US Constitution and the Amendments Essay

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I

The institutional power that I believe to be the most important is the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The authority given to states by this amendment was to ensure that the federal government would never get to big—and yet over the years, this amendment has not proven to be a very good safeguard of states’ rights. So many states, for example, are dependent on federal subsidies that they will not assert themselves in many cases. However, there is still some sign that states recognize their autonomy. For example, in the case of the legalization of marijuana, many states have decriminalized its usage even though according to the federal government it is still a Schedule 1 narcotic (DEA, n.d.). Nonetheless, the federal government is not entirely put off by these states asserting their own rights, and all one has to do is remember that the Civil War was fought specifically because the Southern states asserted their right to leave the Union—and the federal government did not believe they could do this. So I think it is important for states to remember that they have rights.

In terms of personal rights, the First Amendment is the most important because it protects one’s right to free speech, one’s right to assemble and one’s right to protest in order to get the government to redress grievances.

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This is important for people because it is a reminder that the government works for the people not the other way around.

II

The institutional power that I would remove would be the Federal Reserve, which was created in 1913 under the Federal Reserve Act. This Act gave the Fed the right to coin the nation’s money, which is a right that should really only be held by the King—the ruler of the nation, or, in our case, our government. By handing over this right to a group of private bankers, the government essentially made them the rulers of our land. Since then, one can simply look at a chart of the USD to see how it has been devalued through relentless money printing.

There are also so many amendments that I would remove from the Constitution that if it were up to me the only that would still exist would be the 10th Amendment. In this sense, one could say that I identify mostly as an Anti-Federalist and I surely would have disagreed with the many observations of Alexander Hamilton who wrote a lot of the Federalist Papers during the time in American history when men were trying to decide whether or not to ratify the Constitution. I believe that the Anti-Federalists were very aware of how the Constitution could lead to the central government exercising tyranny over the states. Indeed,….....

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