The Will of the People: Readings in American Democracy
Constitution of the United States
The Constitution of the United States created and regulated the government for a "more perfect Union," and it also set the standard for judging the lawfulness of the laws the government might enact to regulate the conduct of individuals in their relationships with one another and with the state.
The way this was done was something very new – a design for a continental federal republic, combining a national government and a plurality of state governments.
In the case of the national government, each of its units – the Congress, the presidency, and the courts – was armed with powers suited to its assigned task, with checks in place to keep out unwarranted invasions of power among the units. Powers not assigned by the Constitution to any unit of government remained in the hands of the people. In addition, the first 10 amendments to the Constitution barred all units of the national government from infringing on the enumerated rights of individual citizens.
James Madison compared the constitutional arrangement to the way that the reciprocal pressures among the planets in the solar system keep each planet in place. Alexander Hamilton explained the arrangement as one in which power was the rival of power. Either way, the arrangement has so effectively withstood the erosion of time that the U.S. Constitution is now the oldest one in the world.
The selected articles from The Christian Science Monitor deal with actual events involving Congress, the presidency, the courts, and the Bill of Rights.