The Constitution

The Constitution

Our Constitution is the supreme law of the United States. The Constitution is the framework for the organization of the United States government and for the relationship of the federal government with the states, citizens and all people within the United States. The Constitution is said to have many flaws that many can argue are relevant.

The fundamental flaw in our system is not the absence of a big political majority. The problem might be structural rather than political. The problem is the underlying document-our written Constitution. Changing the structure of our system is difficult and only made more so because of our flawed understanding of our own history, especially the origins of our founding document. The structure of our Constitution gives us profound insights about what the founders thought was important.

Article I of the Constitution concerns the Legislative branch.

Article II concerns the Executive branch. Article III concerns the judicial branch. The founders thought that the Legislative branch was going to be the great branch of government. They thought that the Executive had to be constrained and controlled; and they hardly gave any thought at all to the judicial branch. In so, structuring the Constitution they were suggesting how the government should work. The design of the Constitution was for a powerful Legislature and well controlled Executive and a weak court system. Article 2 from the readings states that the " new government was to be limited in its powers, one way to keep it limited would be to create the three distinct and non-overlapping branches".

The framer's established three branches of government so that nobody could become too powerful (because the branches would check and balance each other) and also so that the entirety of government was not in the hands of one person. The Framer's made it possible for the Constitution to be open to change, and they did this by making room for amendments. This feature of the Constitution, in, turn, opens the way for a kind of continuous constitution making. Further, the Framer's chose language in its generality and simplicity leaves open how some of the key terms and phrases in the document are to be interpreted. In other words, there is textural evidence that would seem to indicate that the Framer's did not wish their concrete intentions to guide our interpretations. If they had truly wanted us to be guided by what they specifically had in mind by justice, cruel, and unusual, right and wrong, they would not have used such general language, but offered more evidence of their own conceptions, not in great detail necessarily, but they would have done more than name the concepts themselves.

They knew that a revolution did not make a nation and so they set about to put down in writing a form of government that would