Individual rights under the United States constitution

Individual rights under the United States constitution



Individual rights under the United States constitution

Introduction

A constitution of government such as the U.S. Constitution presents a characteristic set of problems for leadership: meeting the demands of the people for the functions government can provide while protecting the rights of the people, not only from private, natural, or external threats, but also from government itself and from tyrannical majorities. (Lehman, 2007) A written constitution, unlike an unwritten parliamentary system of government, is a supreme law that supersedes later laws that conflict with it unless they are adopted as amendments according to the procedures prescribed in the original constitution. It derives its primary legitimacy not from current assent but rather from an original historical constituent act of ratification, and no official act, however popular, can be considered legitimate unless it is logically derived from an authorization contained in the written constitution as amended and as originally understood. (Floyd, 2006)

The political idea on which the U.S. Constitution is founded is that humanity is created by a communal agreement or compact. The main proponent of this theory was the English philosopher John Locke, who developed it in his Second Treatise on Government, published in 1690. Although a new society can be created by adults coming together and explicitly agreeing to form a new society, people are initially inducted into an existing society by their parents or guardians, beginning with a filial contract between parent and child, which is gradually transformed into a social contract between the child and the other members of the society through a process of socialization, through which the child makes the transition from being a good child to being a good citizen. The absolutely vital terms of the social contract are that its members will mutually defend the workout of one another's rights, from anything might impair such exercise. (Siddle, 2008)

Discussion

The expansion of single-issue assemblies means that assembling ruling coalitions and putting people in key places to accomplish required action can be difficult, but this was intended by the framers of the Constitution. They expected that most of the situations requiring rapid response could be handled through general legislation and appointees with a certain amount of legislated discretion and those most new situations that such general legislation did not anticipate would allow enough time to build the kind of consensus needed to adopt new legislation. This has directed to some stress between supports of immediate answer to “emergencies” and advocates of deliberation inside legal structures and methods, and some of that stress has produced in departures from legal compliance. (Siddle, 2008)

Some of those departures have become entrenched and supported by politically powerful constituencies, who often try to conceal the noncompliance with contentions that the established practices allowance to “informal amendments” to the “living” Constitution, even though they are not formal amendments to the text. The problem with this elevation of practices to constitutional status, of course, is that once begun there is no end to it ...