September 21st, 2008 12:19 am |
by Mike Miller
| Published in
Constitution, Liberty, Polling, law, rule of law | 4 Responses
How well do you know the U.S. Constitution? Are you ready to test your knowledge? Thanks to Chip Wood’s Straight Talk, here are 25 questions to test your Constitutional savvy. Care to give it a try? (Attempt to answer each question before reading the answer).
- Has the Constitution always guided our country? See answerNo. Originally the nation functioned under the Continental Congress and the Articles of Confederation. Eleven years after the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution was written, agreed to, and sent to the states for ratification. When ratified by nine states (as the document itself prescribed), the Constitution was declared to be the new governmental system. That occurred on September 13, 1788. The new government was ordered to be convened on March 4, 1789.
- What are the three branches of government named in the Constitution? See answerLegislative, Executive and Judicial.
- Does the Constitution allow the Supreme Court to make law? See answerNo. The very first sentence in the Constitution states: “All legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States….” Any Supreme Court decision is the law of the case that binds only the plaintiff and the defendant. The meaning of the word “all” has not been changed.
- Does the Constitution empower the President to make law? See answerNo. Executive Orders issued by the President that bind the entire nation are illicit because, as noted above, “All legislative powers” are possessed by Congress. An Executive Order that binds only the employees of the federal government (such as granting a holiday) is proper because the President should be considered to be the holder of power much like that possessed by the CEO of a company. But the entire nation is not in the employ of the President. The President does have a role in lawmaking with his possession of a veto. He can veto a measure approved by Congress (which can be overturned by a two-thirds vote in each house of Congress), or simply allow it to become law by doing nothing within 10 days, “Sundays excepted.”
- Does the Constitution give the federal government any power in the field of education? See answerNo. The Constitution contains no mention of any power “herein granted” in the field of education.
- Where in the Constitution is there authorization to dispense foreign aid? See answerNo such authorization appears in the Constitution.
- Does the Constitution mandate a minimum age for a Senator? See answerYes. To be a senator, one must be 30 years of age. He must also be nine years a citizen of the United States and an inhabitant of the state he will serve as a senator.
- What are the Constitutional requirements for a person to be President? See answerA President must be a natural-born citizen (not an immigrant who became a citizen), must be 35 years of age, and must have lived in the United States at least 14 years.
- Did the Constitution give the federal government power to create a bank? See answerNo. Congress was granted power to “coin money,” meaning it was to have power to create a mint where precious metal could be stamped into coinage of fixed size, weight and purity. There is no constitutional authority for the federal government to have created the Federal Reserve.
- Can the provisions of a treaty supersede the Constitution? See answerAbsolutely not. Thomas Jefferson responded to those who consider treaty-making power to be “boundless” by stating, “If it is, then we have no Constitution.”
- Does the Constitution allow a President to take the nation into war? See answerNo, it does not. The sole power to declare the nation at war is possessed by Congress. Congress last used this power at the beginning of World War II when war was declared on Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. (Germany declared war on the U.S. the next day.) A congressional vote to authorize the President to enforce UN Security Council resolutions should never be considered a substitute for a declaration of war.
- Can you name any of the four crimes mentioned in the Constitution? See answerThe four crimes mentioned are: Treason, bribery, piracy and counterfeiting.
- Should the Bill of Rights be considered part of the original Constitution? See answerMany do hold that view because if the promise to add a Bill of Rights had not been made during the ratification process, some states would not have ratified the Constitution.
- According to the Constitution, how can a President and other national officers be removed from office? See answerThe President and other high officers of the federal government can be impeached by a majority in the House and tried by the Senate. Impeachment does not constitute removal; it should be considered the equivalent of an indictment that must be followed by a trial. Two-thirds of the senators “present” must approve removal at the subsequent trial to effect removal.
- What authority does the Constitution give to the Vice President? See answerThe Vice President stands ready to take the office of President if a president shall die or become incapacitated (as defined in the 25th Amendment). He is also the President of the Senate and has the power to break a tie vote should one occur.
- How many amendments have been added to the Constitution? See answerThere are 27. The first ten (the Bill of Rights) can be considered part of the original Constitution. Amendment 18 was repealed by Amendment 21. This means that, in 220 years, only 15 other amendments have been added. The process was deliberately made difficult to keep anything dangerous or silly from being added to the Constitution in the heat of passion.
- How is an amendment added to the Constitution? See answerCongress can propose an amendment when two-thirds of both houses of Congress vote to do so. Any proposed amendment must then by ratified by the legislature or a convention in three-quarters of the states. Amendments can also be proposed by a federal constitutional convention called by two-thirds of the states. Any amendment arising from a constitutional convention must also be ratified by the legislature or a convention in three-quarters of the states.
- Does the Constitution say anything about illegal immigration? See answerNot directly. But Article IV, Section 4 assigns to the federal government the duty “to protect each of them [the states] from invasion.” It does not specify that the invasion must be military. When 20 million enter our nation illegally, it is an invasion that should be repelled by the federal government.
- What is the process mentioned in the Constitution for adding new states to the union? See answerBy a majority vote in each House of Congress, a new state can be added to the union. This was done twice in 1958 to welcome Alaska and Hawaii as the 49th and 50th states.
- Is the term of a President limited by the Constitution? See answerYes. In 1951, Amendment 22 was added to the Constitution to limit any president to two terms. The only president who served longer than two terms was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who held office during a fourth four-year term. He died in April 1945 shortly after beginning his 13th year in office.
- Which part of the federal government holds “the power of the purse”? See answerThe House of Representatives. Article I, Section 7 states: “All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives….” If a majority in the House (218 of its 435 members) refuses to originate a bill to raise revenue for any particular purpose, no funds can be raised for that purpose.
- Does the Constitution provide a method for expelling a member of Congress? See answerTwo-thirds of each house has the authority to expel any of its members for cause even though the member has been elected by voters.
- What does the Constitution say about financing an army and a navy? See answerCongress can raise an army but “no appropriation of money” to fund it shall be for longer than two years. And Congress can provide for a navy without that same restriction regarding funding. Why? The men who wrote the Constitution feared the possibility that a standing army housed within the nation might arise and seek to take power. But they did not fear that a navy would try to do so, because a navy and its weaponry did not reside within the nation, only at sea or at coastal seaports.
- How many times is the word “democracy” mentioned in the Constitution? See answerThe word “democracy” does not appear in the Constitution. Our nation is a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy. The Founders feared Democracy (unrestricted rule by majority) and favored a Republic (rule of law where the law limits the government). James Madison wrote: “…. Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”
- Does the Bill of Rights grant the people free speech, freedom of the press, the right to possess a weapon, etc? See answerNo. The Declaration of Independence, which provides the philosophical base of our nation, states very clearly that our rights are granted to us by our “Creator.”
The various rights noted in the Bill of Rights were not granted by government. The purpose of the Bill of Rights is to prevent the federal government from suspending any of those God-given rights, including the right to possess a weapon. Those who claim “Second Amendment rights,” for instance, make a big mistake with such a statement. If the right is granted by the Second Amendment, meaning by government, it can be taken away by government. If the right is granted by God, only He can take it away.
Liberty Maven
Follow LM on Twitter
September 21st, 2008 at 6:37 am (#)
That was fun, Mike! And I learned a few things, too!
September 23rd, 2008 at 1:09 am (#)
Some of the questions and answers are straighforward, such as the one concerned with the term limits on the President and the minimum age for a Senator.
But others, such as, say, #3 amd #4, are not.
The questions are :What is “legislative power”; what is “the executive power” and what is “the judicial power”
The simple answer given is that all legislative power must reside in the Congress, and that seems good, until we ask exactly what it is that a President does when he is commaning the armed forces in wartime. Are not those commnds of his a kind of law, of a kind of legislation?
If all the legislative power must reside in Congrees, and yet the President also makes law when commanding the armed forces, or indeed, as the signatory on any piece of legislation, then we have a seeming contradiction or paprdox. The sam also applies to the judicial power. If the Congress passes a law that is clearly unconstitutional, say for example the idea that the Federal Reserve was an unconstitutional act, but the Court doesn’t rule against that act, then hasn’t the court made law? Indeed, if the Congress passed the act creating the Fed and the Court ruled it a constitutional act, has it not, yet again, made law, by which we mean aiding the Congress to go beyond the limits set in the Constitution as are viewed by the author of this questionnaire?
It has been remarked by those who have studied it, that the Federalists won the debates for the new Constitution, that the anti-Federalists lost because they could not out together a coherent argument that was either for the Articles or against the Constitution. So it was with the creation of the Fed, the Dept of Education, the New Deal and the rest. Indeed, not all or even many of the Framers/Founders were in agreement with all of those things in the Constitution–George Washington himself, in a letter to LaFayette, noted that while he was no real partisan of the Constitution, thought it might work if the powers were so seperated into those three branches and, most importantly, that there was any virtue left in the body of the people.
Indeed, if one compares certain phrasing common to the Articles and the Constitution, one can discover why the Fed and the rest came to be. For example, the Elastic clause, the words “necessary and proper” in the Constitution contained, in the Articles, the word “absolutely”–this word was dropped for the Constitution, making the clause “elastic”–
There’s also this :James Madison, in the Federalist, noted two things. 1. that the people, if they have a passion or interst in or for something long enough, despite the auxiliary precautions aka the Constitution and the laws, will get whatever it is they want, and in this case, he used as the example, the push for paper money. 2. that all laws are written in the murky medium of human language. Even if they are written by the best, most honest and brightest, the words still need their meanings ascertained and liquidated through dicussions, legislation and court rulings–indeed, Madison noted that the Almighty was proabaly chagrined to have have His Will delivered in human language, while it was quite clear, it still had to suffer the translations in that dark and murky medium.
So, the answer to most of the thorny questions is a qualified one–except as to certain straightforward questions regarding the amending procedure or the lengths of terms or the number of branches (well, even that last is in disopute as there are extra-copnstitutional things that impinge on the three branches, such as political parties, the bureaucracy and the so-called Fouth branch of government aka the free press)
Anyone seen that Constitution of the United States, Annotated?
November 5th, 2008 at 12:55 pm (#)
@RBurnett, who asked: “The simple answer given is that all legislative power must reside in the Congress, and that seems good, until we ask exactly what it is that a President does when he is commaning the armed forces in wartime. Are not those commnds of his a kind of law, of a kind of legislation?”
The answer to that is eluded to in #4. The President can create commands for his employees (Executive branch, military), but cannot create commands for the People. So what he does by commanding the army is not legislation.
April 9th, 2009 at 2:44 pm (#)
If congress breaks the US constitution how can that be over turned. Ed at edvan@evdco.net.