6 Principles Of Government

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 These principles can be found in many of our nation's historical documents, from the Constitution to the Declaration of Independence.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

also means that the entire system can only exist with the consent of the governed. This principle is stated in the Constitution namely in the Preamble. It basically states that the people are the United States of America and that it is the people who are putting the constitution into effect. You can also see this in the Declaration of Independence, where it talks about how people can get rid of the government if it is corrupt. This document shows that Americans were against the government being too strong and believed that the populous was inherently good morally and would make the right decision.

Another principle of our government is checks and balances, which basically means that there is a system in place in our government that prevents one branch from having too much power, and each branch is checking up on the others to make sure they aren't making any drastically horrible decisions.

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

people.

Separation of Powers in American government means that we have three branches, judicial, executive, and legislative, and that they are independent and equal branches.

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

politicians.
So to wrap things up, our political system has many of principles that make it what it is. We have popular sovereignty, which is the idea of people being the root of any/all governmental power. Checks and balances is a system of overlapping of the three branches to permit them to check the actions of the others. Separation of powers mean that we have three branches in our government and that they are all independent and equal. You can find examples of all of these in our Constitution, as well as in other historical governments like the Declaration of Independence and the Federalist Papers. These all show how the Framers thought was the best way to run the government, and these principles have withstood hundreds of years and are still used today.