6 Principles Of Government

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In American government, there are six basic principles in our Constitution. These principles include popular sovereignty, limited government, separation of powers, checks and balances, judicial review, and federalism. They have all made an important impact on society today, including popular sovereignty, checks and balances, and separation of powers. These principles can be found in many of our nation's historical documents, from the Constitution to the Declaration of Independence. Through these, we can see what lawmakers from the revolution thought of the future of America and the vision they had.
One principle of American government is popular sovereignty, which is the idea of people being the source of any and all governmental power. It …show more content…

You can see this in the Constitution in Article II Section 2, which states how the President can veto a bill even if it has passed in Congress if he/she feels that the bill is unconstitutional. This power makes it so that Congress doesn’t have more power than the president, but at the same time there is a rule that if 2/3 of congress votes in favor of the bill, then they can make it a law anyway, ensuring that the President doesn’t have more power than Congress. This principle can also be outlined in the Federalist Papers. Federalist Paper No. 51 states "Ambition must be made to counter ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place." This meant that the framers believed that if one person/branch had all of the power, we would be far more corrupt and more like the monarchical government that they had just left in England. They believed that we would have a much better system if we distributed powers amongst lots of …show more content…

You can see an example of this in the Constitution in the first sections of Articles I-III. These sections spell out the powers of each branch of government and states who can do what and who has what powers. You can see how each of the branches have distinct things they can and can’t do, and how no branch is more powerful than another. This principle can also be found in the Massachusetts State Constitution. It states "Each branch shall never exercise the powers of another branch," meaning that each branch in our government has its own distinct powers and that the other branches cannot overtake them. This meant, again, that they wanted to be a different country than their mother country England. They knew that all of the power being in one person's hands was a recipe for disaster. So they took all of the powers that a political system should have and divided it amongst three different areas, so that no one person was too powerful. They believed that this was the best way to avoid corrupt

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