The Constitution

Creation of the U.S. Constitution

The Articles of Confederation was the first Constitution of the independent joined States of America. It was instituted before the Revolutionary War was even won, and was in force since 1781. Whether or not to accept the Articles was a very controversial issue, "as witnessed by the drawn-out ratification dates." Many of the people feared a strong central government, fearing that it would become tyrannical. The Articles of Confederation "created a federation in which the one-by-one State powers directed supreme, at the expense of a strong national government." But the items of Confederation had its feeble points. It had no cohesive power, and was incapable "to regulate abuses amidst the States." It had insufficient power to control business.

What U.S constitution protects?

By December 1791, 10 of the 12 amendments proposed by Congress in 1789 had been ratified by the legislatures of three fourths of the states, as Article V requires, and so became the first 10 amendments, known popularly as the Bill of Rights. The first eight protect various individual rights, among them freedom of speech and press, religious freedom, the right to keep and bear arms, protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, property rights, the right to a jury trial in both civil and criminal cases, and various procedural safeguards for the rights of the accused. The 9th and 10th Amendments provide general rules of constitutional interpretation designed to solve the problems Federalists maintained would arise from the addition of a bill of rights to the Constitution: the 9th protects against the loss of unenumerated rights, while the 10th explicitly limits the national government to those powers enumerated in the Constitution.

In the 210 years since the ratification of the Bill of Rights, the Constitution has been amended only 17 times. By far the most significant ...