American Constitution

Adopted at a special convention that met in Philadelphia the summer of 1787 and then ratified by state conventions during the years 1787-1790, the U.S. Constitution is the second constitution of the national government of the United States and for over 200 years has provided the principal American model for limited constitutional government under the rule of law (Kelly, 85).

By the mid-1780s, many Americans had become quite unhappy with the first national constitution, the Articles of Confederation. The Articles had created a national government with limited powers, vested in a Congress, but the state governments retained most powers, including the power to levy taxes to pay the expenses of the national government (Färber, 33). The impetus for the Constitution arose from a 1786 conference in Annapolis, Maryland, where 12 delegates from 5 states met and adopted a resolution calling for a convention to meet the following year in Philadelphia to make the national constitution “adequate to the exigencies of the Union.”

Between May 28 and September 17, 1787, the Constitutional Convention—with 55 delegates from 12 states, as Rhode Island boycotted the meeting—assembled in closed sessions (Ely, 19). Although some prominent revolutionary leaders were absent—including Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who were in Europe serving as American ambassadors—the delegates included such respected statesmen as Benjamin Franklin, James Madison, and George Washington (who was unanimously elected the Convention's presiding officer).

The framers of the Constitution incorporated into it various devices for limiting power and safeguarding against its abuse. Those devices included not only the new concept of enumerating powers, but also others that had been incorporated into early state constitutions, such as the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the amending process.

Some of its key structural features, however, resulted from political compromise. The most important of these centered on the bicameral nature of the federal Congress (Barnett, 52). The structure of Congress was a product of the “Great Compromise” between two competing plans offered early in the Convention: The Virginia Plan would have created a tripartite national government—an executive, a judiciary, and a bicameral legislature with the states represented by population; the third would be possessed of broad powers, including the power to veto state laws. The New Jersey Plan, in contrast, would have retained the basic structure of the Articles of Confederation government—including an equal vote for each state in Congress—but would have allowed the national government additional enumerated powers, including the ...