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Branches of Government Paper

Magda Rodriguez Dominguez

University of Phoenix

Branches of government
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There had never been a democratic system designed from scratch all at once. Our founding fathers were

worried that our system might be taken over by a particularly strong president or congressional leaders.

So they set up the government in three branches that were meant to be co-equal, and gave all the branches

'checks and balances' against each other. Congress can't pass a law without the president's signature,

unless they have a supermajority, an even then laws are subject to being found unconstitutional by the

Supreme Court. The president is subject to oversight by Congress. The Supreme Court justices are

appointed for life so they don't have to worry about re-election, but they must be nominated by the

president and approved by the Senate.

Yet government under the Articles of Confederation taught them that there was a need for a strong

centralized government.
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With this in mind the framers wrote the Constitution to provide for a separation of powers, or three

separate branches of government. Each has its own responsibilities and at the same time they work

together to make the country run smoothly and to assure that the rights of citizens are not ignored or

disallowed. This is done through checks and balances. A branch may use its powers to check the powers

of the other two in order to maintain a balance of power among the three branches of government.

The three branches of the U.S. Government are the legislative, executive, and judicial. There’s a image

example on top , from the US Government manual.

Legislative Branch

The legislative branch of government is made up of the Congress and government agencies, such as the

Government Printing Office and Library of Congress, which provide assistance to and support services

for the Congress. Article I of the Constitution established this branch and gave Congress the power to

make laws. Congress has two parts, the House of Representatives and the Senate.

Executive Branch
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The executive branch of Government makes sure that the laws of the United States are obeyed. The

President of the United States is the head of the executive branch of government. This branch is very

large so the President gets help from the Vice President, department heads (Cabinet members), and heads

of independent agencies.

 President: Leader of the country and commands the military.

 Vice President: President of the Senate and becomes President if the President can no longer do

the job.

 Departments: Department heads advise the President on issues and help carry out policies.

 Independent Agencies: Help carry out policy or provide special services

Judicial Branch

The judicial branch of government is made up of the court system. The Supreme Court is the

highest court in the land. Article III of the Constitution established this Court and all other

Federal courts were created by Congress. Courts decide arguments about the meaning of laws,

how they are applied, and whether they break the rules of the Constitution

While the intention of a three branched government with separate powers was to keep the balance of

power in favor of the people, this is hardly the result. The President of the United States today is known

to most of the world as the leader of the free world, where he finds increasing power through the dubious

acts of Executive Orders, who doesn't waste time convincing Congress to declare war on this countries

enemies and instead encourages legislation that would allow him to even further by pass Constitutional

restraints so he may police the world. Today, the voters listen attentively while political candidates for the
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Presidency explain how they will bring universal health care to the people even though such an act would

have to be legislated by Congress and assuming the Supreme Court is interested in the rule of law the

whole health care issue proposed by a presidential candidate who won't have any power to legislate it if

elected would be struck down as unconstitutional anyway.

While Congress has the power to declare war the politicians who run for office have found it politically

expedient to allow the sitting President to go ahead and run the military in any way he sees fit, unless the

people who oppose the wars that follow grow into massive numbers then they will stand on their soap box

and demand special legislation, Congressional hearings and Constitutional Amendments that would

punish the sitting President for going to war without any declaration from Congress. The Supreme Court

while limited in its original power granted them by the people found new powers in the activism of judges

who created their own laws, levied taxes on the public through judicial policies and increasingly decide

on laws that favor the government over the people while dismissing the rights of the people as privileges

that exist to be regulated by the court approved tyrants we call our elected officials. Each branch has

discovered hidden and secret meanings in the Constitution as if it were written by Nostradamus instead of

many men who attended a Constitutional convention that have made each branch more powerful and

rather than serving to check the other two branches, their idea of harmony is to create unwritten powers

and share it amongst the branches. As long as it means abusing the rights of the people then it will find

approval within any branch of the government. If the people want a good debate then lead them towards

protecting the rights of the people and watch the debates begin, the filibusters blow long and hard, the

press conference go on and on as government keeps going.

The states and Congress have never fully agreed on how to share or divide responsibility for governing

the nation. For more than two centuries the states have protested acts of Congress that in the states'

opinion have undermined their autonomy and independence. That conflict erupted once into the Civil War

and has spawned numerous other political disputes.

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Certain areas, such as national defense, clearly lie in the federal domain. But the Constitution was unclear

in many gray areas as to what level of government was in charge. Often the Supreme Court has been

forced to referee disputes, deciding whether the federal government or the states are ultimately

responsible.

The sharing of responsibility for governing is called federalism. In the United States federalism means

that a national government, fifty state governments, and thousands of local governments all operate at

different levels. By the twenty-first century, the federal government clearly dominated the relationship;

several Supreme Court decisions had enhanced federal authority, as had the enormous flow of federal

money to state and local governments. The philosophical debate over states' rights influenced the drafting

of the nation's first documents. Statesmen such as Alexander Hamilton, who favored a strong national

government, and Thomas Jefferson, who favored the states, continued the dialogue even after the

Constitution appeared to resolve many issues.

The southern states took their concept of states' rights to its ultimate test in 1860 and 1861 when eleven

states voted to secede from the Union. Their action was triggered by the election of President Abraham

Lincoln; he opposed slavery and argued that the states, by joining the Union, had given up certain rights.

The victory of the Union in 1865 made the national government supreme and settled the argument about

secession. But other aspects of the debate remained in dispute. The concept of states' rights continued to

be identified with those reluctant to end racial discrimination.

Champions of states' rights renewed their battle in the late 1940s and 1950s, as federal efforts to end

racial discrimination intensified. When the Democratic National Convention in 1948 adopted a pro civil

rights platform, disgruntled southerners from thirteen states established a States' Rights, or Dixiecrat,

Party. They nominated for President Strom Thurmond, the South Carolina governor; Thurmond
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eventually won in Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and South Carolina. (Thurmond went on to enter the

Senate as a Democrat in 1954 and became a Republican in 1964.)

Southern states also rallied around the states' rights cry in 1954, when the Supreme Court outlawed

racially segregated public schools. For the next decade, congressional opponents of civil rights laws often

made the claim that states had constitutional rights to resist federal policy. A 1956 manifesto signed by

101 southern members of Congress declared, “We commend the motives of those states which have

declared the intention to resist forced integration by any lawful means.” In 1957 President Dwight D.

Eisenhower sent federal troops to enforce civil rights in Little Rock, Arkansas, where black students

enrolled at the previously all-white Central High School.

The New Federalism

President Richard Nixon pushed a new federalism that would return responsibility to the state and local

levels. He wanted to accompany that with an infusion of federal money, which he called revenue sharing.

Congress in 1972 approved the revenue-sharing program, which provided virtually unrestricted grants to

state and local governments. However, it resisted Nixon's efforts to combine most categorical grant

programs, aimed at specific problems, into block grants, a move designed to give more flexibility to local

administrators
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In American discourse separation of powers is more a name than a description. None of the three

branches (legislative, executive, or judicial) of the national government are clearly separate from one

another. Congress, for example, has an impeachment club to check the others; the president's veto power

is plainly legislative in nature. No wonder James Madison in The Federalist, undertook to answer the

Anti‐Federalist charge that The several departments of power are not separated but blended in such a

manner as at once to destroy all symmetry and beauty of form, and to expose some of the essential parts

of the edifice to the danger of being crushed by the disproportionate weight of other parts. Madison's

answer was that Montesquieu the oracle of separation did not mean that departments ought to have no

partial agency in, or control over, the acts of each other. He meant rather that the whole power of one

department should not be exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of another

department. The merit of blending, according to Madison, was that, along with bicameralism and

federalism, it produced a safety net of checks and balances.

A crucial problem is that split power inevitably entails split accountability. No wonder then that so many

difficulties in American government spring ultimately from its divided power system. In contrast, the

parliamentary system seeks safety in clear, direct lines of electoral accountability and less in a

mechanistic clash of sundered agencies of government. Concentrating power for effective action in a

prime minister, it makes that person directly amenable to parliament while the latter is directly amenable

to the electorate. This scheme largely eliminates what for Americans is a persistent quandary: which of

several shells hide the peas of power and responsibility? That quandary partially accounts for the sense of

frustration that is so widespread in the American electorate.

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Conclusion

A foremost characteristic of the American political system is its division of authority between a national

government and state governments. The first U.S. government, established by the Articles of

Confederation, was essentially a union of the states.

In establishing a stronger national government, the U.S. Constitution also made provision for

safeguarding state interests. The result was the creation of a federal system in which sovereignty was

vested in both national and state governments. The Constitution enumerates the general powers of the

national government and grants it implied powers through the necessary and proper clause. Other powers

are reserved to the states by the Tenth Amendment. The states found it convenient at times to argue that

their sovereignty took precedence over national authority. In the end, it took the Civil War to cement the

idea that the United States was a union of people, not of states. Federalism reflected the doctrine that

certain policy areas were the exclusive responsibility of the national government whereas responsibility in

other policy areas belonged exclusively to the states. This constitutional position validated the laissez-

faire doctrine that big business was largely beyond governmental control. In the areas of commerce,

taxation, spending, civil rights, and civil liberties, among others, the federal government now plays an

important role, one that is the inevitable consequence of the increasing complexity of American society

and the interdependence of its people. National, state and local officials now work closely together to

solve the country’s problems, a situation described as cooperative federalism. The issue of the

relationship between the nation and the states has changed somewhat as a result of devolution a shift of

power downward to the states. This change, like changes throughout U.S. history, sprang from our

demands.
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Reference

The American Democracy, Eighth Edition

Chapter 3: Federalism. Forging a Nation

ISBN: 9780073103495 Author: Thomas E. Patterson

copyright © 2008 McGraw-Hill, a business unit of the McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

http://www.temple.edu/federalism/
answers.yahoo.com › Politics & Government › Government

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www.britannica.com/presidents/article