To form a more perfect union, “We the People” need to fight to restrain the size of the government to prevent encroachment on the rights of individuals and families by an unrestrained and massive centralized governance system.
This great nation found its beginnings in separating from the excessively powerful and abusively controlling government of Great Britain, proving that a big government society is destined to fail. The 13 colonies, starting in 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia, enjoyed self-governance and autonomy for almost 120 years. After the French-Indian war, the parliament of great Britain extended its legal bailiwick 3500 miles across the Atlantic ocean, and imposed a series of increasingly onerous acts and laws to get …show more content…
The colonists did not give in, however, leading to the American Revolution against the British, whom the colonists claimed to be tyrants. The patriotic colonists expressed these rebellious sentiments in our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of …show more content…
The first words of our nation’s constitution are “We the People”, as the founding fathers purposely crafted the constitution to limit the power of the government and to provide the people with more power. The constitution has many features to purposefully restrain our government, most importantly checks and balances, the system that one branch of government uses to reign the other one in from becoming too powerful. Furthermore, during the Federalist and Anti-Federalist debates, the Federalists added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, a list of rights of the people that the government cannot infringe on. As stated in the constitution, specifically the 10th amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” (Madison). What makes the constitution unique is that perhaps for the first time in history a nation created a government with certain enumerated powers, rather than an open-ended mandate to rule (for example, the belief in medieval times that kings ruled with God-given powers). This idea is the constitution’s basic belief, that the powers of the federal government should not be too vast, which allows for a better democratic system. This same
This great nation found its beginnings in separating from the excessively powerful and abusively controlling government of Great Britain, proving that a big government society is destined to fail. The 13 colonies, starting in 1607, when Jamestown was founded in Virginia, enjoyed self-governance and autonomy for almost 120 years. After the French-Indian war, the parliament of great Britain extended its legal bailiwick 3500 miles across the Atlantic ocean, and imposed a series of increasingly onerous acts and laws to get …show more content…
The colonists did not give in, however, leading to the American Revolution against the British, whom the colonists claimed to be tyrants. The patriotic colonists expressed these rebellious sentiments in our nation’s founding document, the Declaration of …show more content…
The first words of our nation’s constitution are “We the People”, as the founding fathers purposely crafted the constitution to limit the power of the government and to provide the people with more power. The constitution has many features to purposefully restrain our government, most importantly checks and balances, the system that one branch of government uses to reign the other one in from becoming too powerful. Furthermore, during the Federalist and Anti-Federalist debates, the Federalists added the Bill of Rights to the Constitution, a list of rights of the people that the government cannot infringe on. As stated in the constitution, specifically the 10th amendment, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people” (Madison). What makes the constitution unique is that perhaps for the first time in history a nation created a government with certain enumerated powers, rather than an open-ended mandate to rule (for example, the belief in medieval times that kings ruled with God-given powers). This idea is the constitution’s basic belief, that the powers of the federal government should not be too vast, which allows for a better democratic system. This same