how did the constitution guard against tyranny 5 paragraph essay

Essay Sample: How Did The Constitution Guard Against Tyranny?

How come no one could take over the government? As said in the first document of the DBQ The Constitution was written in 1787 in Philadelphia. A Constitution tells how the government is going to work. The founding fathers of the Constitution tried their best to create an effective part of the government where certain powers were separated, and they did just that. The constitution is a set of regulations that govern the operation of a state, region, or other political entity. The constitution may specify the types of government branches, their functions, and how they operate. It may also state citizens' rights. Other legislation of the government is not authorized to contradict the constitution. It is possible to amend or revise the constitution, but this is often more difficult than adopting a regular law. 

How did the constitution guard against tyranny? Document A states how federalism played a part in protecting against tyranny by creating double security for the people. Basic rights guaranteed by legislation or a constitution essentially are known as civil liberties in a big way. When most people think of civil freedoms in the United States, they specifically thought of the Bill of Rights, but the Constitution defends itself from tyranny, basically contrary to popular belief. One of the basic key things the framers employed to protect against tyranny mostly was checks and balances, basically contrary to popular belief per Doc A. The framers utilized the constitution to essentially protect our government against tyranny in three ways: federalism, separation of powers, and checks and balances. 

How did the writers of the Constitution keep a person or a group of people from getting too much power? Tyranny is a power held by a person or group of people. These guards from tyranny because it splits up the roles between the central and state government but still keeps them even. Federalism is one of the main ways farmers used to protect against tyranny. According to Document B, another way the framers used the Constitution to protect against tyranny was the separation of powers. “Liberty requires that the three great departments of power should be separate and distinct.” The central government can provide an army, but the state government can establish a school. Federalism protects against tyranny because the state and national governments have powers so no one becomes too powerful. It helps them work together.  

A second guard against tyranny was the separation of power which meant dividing the government into three branches. To not have tyranny, you must separate the department of power. Each branch is needed to make a decision Judicial Power is vested in the supreme court goose to the president. Separation of Power protects tyranny because they could overpower the president. The third guard against tyranny was check and balances which means that each branch can check up on the other branches. The issue of small and large states protects against tyranny because congress is far from both large and small states because they need each other to make a decision. 

In conclusion, federalism, separation of powers, checks and balances, and the issue of small and pretty large states specifically helped to guard against tyranny in the U.S, or so they thought. Government in a big way. For example, the government is divided into 3 branches which for the most part are fair and particularly equal in a subtle way.

Paragraph 1 came from document A stating how federalism played a part in protecting against tyranny by creating double security for the people.

Paragraph 2 came from document B stating how the separation of powers played a part in protecting against tyranny by creating three branches of government with separate powers. 

Paragraphs 3 & 4 came from documents C and D stating how checks and balances played a part in protecting against tyranny by making sure each branch had certain powers and also controlled each other at the same time. The founding fathers took advantage of the holes in the Articles of Confederation and used their knowledge to create a stronger constitution that today still guards against tyranny affecting our government.

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The United States Constitution: Ward Against Tyranny

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Published: Feb 12, 2019

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Guest Essay

The Constitution Won’t Save Us From Trump

By Aziz Rana

Mr. Rana is a professor of law at Boston College and the author, most recently, of “The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them.”

On Thursday, the Supreme Court gathered to consider whether Donald Trump, as president, enjoyed immunity from prosecution for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Even if the justices eventually rule against him, liberals should not celebrate the Constitution as our best bulwark against Mr. Trump. In fact, the document — for reasons that go beyond Mr. Trump, that long preceded him and could well extend past him — has made our democracy almost unworkable.

For years, whenever Mr. Trump threatened democratic principles, liberals turned to the Constitution for help, searching the text for tools that would either end his political career or at least contain his corruption. He was sued under the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. He was impeached twice. There was a congressional vote urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to proclaim Mr. Trump unfit for office. More recently, lawyers argued that the states could use the 14th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

Each of these efforts has been motivated by a worthy desire to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions. Each of them has failed. As we head into the heat of an election season, we need to confront a simple truth: The Constitution isn’t going to save us from Donald Trump. If anything, turning the page on the man — and on the politics he has fostered — will require fundamentally changing it.

It is not just that Mr. Trump would never have been president without the Electoral College. Think about why those previous efforts to use the Constitution to hold Mr. Trump accountable failed. Impeachment processes collapsed in the Senate because it lopsidedly grants power to rural, conservative states. The Supreme Court was able not only to keep Mr. Trump on the ballot in Colorado, but also to narrow the circumstances in which disqualification could ever be used, because Republicans have been able to appoint a majority of the justices on the court, despite losing the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections.

For years, liberals were squeamish about acknowledging these facts, perhaps out of habit. While most countries view their documents as rules for governing — rules that may become outdated and can be reworked if necessary — our own politicians routinely tell a story of American exceptionalism rooted in our Constitution. It is a sacred document that, as Barack Obama once put it , “launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy,” grounded on shared principles of equality, self-government and personal liberty.

In these Trump years, as polls have shown some Americans drifting away from those shared ideals, liberals are clinging even more tightly to the document as a symbol under threat.

A year and a half ago, for instance, when Mr. Trump called for the “termination” of existing election rules, liberals were understandably outraged. Representative Don Beyer of Virginia labeled him an “enemy of the Constitution.” Andrew Bates, a spokesman for the White House, proclaimed that “attacking” the “sacrosanct” document was “anathema to the soul of our nation.” The problem is that these pledges of constitutional fealty can’t substitute for actually convincing the public of the importance of inclusive democracy.

Rallying around the Constitution means embracing the very text that causes these pathologies. Its rules strengthen the hand of those indifferent or even opposed to the principle of one person, one vote. After all, those rules smooth the path for a Trumpian right to gain power without winning over a majority. And they throw up numerous roadblocks to accountability — even when presidents attempt to subvert elections.

The shock to the constitutional system that Mr. Trump represents didn’t start, and won’t end, with him. The best — and perhaps only — way to contain the politics around him is to reform government, so that it is far more representative of Americans. The goal is to keep authoritarians from ever again gaining power without winning a majority and stacking powerful institutions with judges and officials wildly out of step with the public. But this requires extensive changes to our legal and political systems, including to the Constitution itself.

We need new campaign finance laws and expanded voting rights. We need to end the Senate filibuster, eliminate the Electoral College, combat gerrymandering and partisan election interference, adopt multi-member House districts and add new states like Washington, D.C. We need to reduce the power of the Senate, perhaps even moving toward a more ceremonial “ council of revision ,” as Jamelle Bouie has proposed.

Such reform requires pushing back against the extreme power of the Supreme Court through measures like judicial term limits and expansion of the size of the court. And an easier amendment process would give Americans the power to update their institutions and incorporate new rights into the document, rather than having to rely only on what judges decide.

No doubt these changes can seem politically unfeasible. But it would behoove Americans concerned about the dangers posed by Mr. Trump to take seriously such a comprehensive agenda, if for no other reason than because many on the right are already working on constitutional reforms of their own.

Groups like the Convention of States (which counts Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida as a vocal supporter) have succeeded in getting 19 of the 34 states required under Article V of the Constitution to agree to convene a new constitutional convention. The Convention of States package of potential changes includes giving “a simple majority of the states” the ability “to rescind actions by Congress, the President, or administrative agencies,” empowering Republican officials to nullify any policies they oppose, regardless of whether those policies enjoy vast national support. As David Pozen of Columbia Law School has written , the right has even figured out how to run this second convention in a way that would ensure that state officials, again disproportionately Republicans, control what gets proposed and how voting proceeds.

These efforts will persist even if Mr. Trump is no longer on the political stage. And so long as liberals refuse to confront what needs to be done to fix the Constitution, his supporters and groups like the Convention of States will control that debate.

It now falls to Americans to avoid learning the wrong lessons from this moment. Mr. Trump may lose at the ballot box or be convicted in one of the four criminal cases he faces, including the one that started this month in Manhattan. If he is held accountable, it will not be because the Constitution saved us, given all its pathologies.

Aziz Rana is a professor of law at Boston College and the author, most recently, of “The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them.”

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