The U.S. Constitution
Introduction
The United States constitution was enacted on the 7th of September 1787 as the supreme law of the country in Philadelphia. The constitution became official in the 4th of March, 1789. Since then the constitution has undergone important amendments by the Congress. The constitution guides the central government as well as the individual states although the individual states can make their own independent rules as well as amendments. This has raised the question as to whether the constitution creators might have been torn between the central government and the individual state governments. This paper analyzes why the framers of the United States Constitution were torn between creating a governmental system with a strong central government, and building a system where most of the power would be positioned in the individual states.
At the time when the constitution was being drafted, the framers were restricted and annoyed by the British imperial government. For instance the British leadership unaccounted for tax decree implementations in some US states. To deprive the central government of such misuse of powers they had come up with the idea to divide the powers with the state governments. The central government was seen as the biggest threat to the limitation the Imperial government imposed. As a result, the main challenge facing the Constitutional gathering in Philadelphia in 1787 was the way to restraint the power of the central government. It also had to give it with enough power to safeguard the national interest. To obtain a resulting solution to this, they had to ensure that the national as well as the state government shared the powers.
The framers of the constitution considered the federal government (the Central government) and the individual state governments as two separate institutions formed by functions and mandate. James Madison is one of the people who drafted the United States constitution. He is famous for the Virginia Plan. Madison stated that the two governments were different agents and trustees of the people, formed with different powers, and designed for different purpose. Many of the provisions of the Virginia plan were opposed by the delegates who represented the smaller states. Considering the different powers as well as the purposes the national and state governments, the framers had a task to separate their powers and purposes. They failed to distribute effectively and appropriately the functions and mandate of the two since they had different ideas.
The delegates at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia did not share like-mind concerning the power division between the central and state governments. The British Imperial Government and the European political theory had defined sovereignty as indivisible as well as unitary (Bobee, 2009). When the Americans broke with the British in 1776, the framers of the constitution altered it denying both the national and state government sovereignty. The differences in idea of the framers of the United States of America constitution have led to the present day struggles in the Supreme Court to define the powers between them.
In conclusion, for the past at least two hundred years there have been the differences and fights between the central and state governments. However, the federalism system has been serving as the root for democracy in the United States. They had been against the unitary and indivisible system by the British Imperial Government; the reason as to why the framers of the U.S. Constitution were torn between creating a governmental system with a strong central government and building a system where most of the power would be positioned in the individual states. They therefore drafted a constitution denying both the central and state governments the sovereignty and this led to unclear clauses that caused the confusion between them. Even thought the U.S constitution was adopted with the votes from states delegates at the convention in Philadelphia. The unclear clauses continue to cause confusion and divisions between the Americans in the present century.
References
The American Revolution - (The Battle of Yorktown ). (2013). Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://www.theamericanrevolution.org/battledetail.aspx?battle=29
Bobee, D. M. (2009). Servile Discontents: Slavery and Resistance in Colonial New Hampshire, 1645–1785. Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group, 30(3), 339-360. Retrieved from https://ottawau.blackboard.com/courses/1/HPS-11053-ES-2013-OA/content/_1064666_1/dir_Week3_HPS-11053.zip/articleweek3.pdf
UMKC School of Law-The Constitutional Convention of 1787. (2013). Retrieved May 26, 2013, from http://law2.umkc.edu/
