Here are a few main points of this lesson:
- The Preamble of the Constitution and the Articles
- The United States is a federation of 50 States under one Constitution.
- The US Constitution contains the laws on a national level.
- The US Constitution and the 10th Amendment: Sates Rights.
- States are broken down further into districts, counties, municipalities, cities, etc.
- Different states, or even parts of a state, might have different ordinances, penalties, fines, taxes, etc.
The Preamble of the Constitution and the Articles
“We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
~Source: Preamble of the United States Constitution
The Articles (7) include measures to determine the role of the branches of the government (federal and state) and to verify the legal status of the Constitution. The most important for students to understand for this lesson is Article V (five). Article V specifies the ability to amend, or make changes to, the Constitution.
50 States under one US Constitution
The current US Constitution was adopted in 1788, 12 years after the United States earned their independence from England. This is the second constitution that was written for the US. The first constitution was called the Articles of the Confederation (and Perpetual Union) and was written in 1776 (the year of the nation’s birth), sent out to the states in 1777, and ratified by all of the 13 original colonies by 1781.
The Bill of Rights (see lesson on “The Bill of Rights”): these are the first 10 Amendments, or ‘laws’ of the Constitution. Since then the Constitution has been amended (changes and additions) 17 times for a total of 27 Amendments.
The 10th Amendment
For the purposes of this lesson, we will be looking at the 10th Amendment. It states:
“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.”
~Tenth Amendment of the US Constitution
This essentially means that if the Constitution does not specify a law, then each of the 50 states has the right to create and regulate laws in the way the people of that state wish. This includes topics such as gun control, state taxes, death penalty and anything else that is not specifically outlined in the Constitution.
The 50 states are separate entities, which have their own state constitutions, governments, courts, and even supreme courts. Some states call their “laws” ‘codes’, ‘revisited statues’, or ‘compiled statutes’. Furthermore, state have given out the power of lawmaking to thousands of agencies, townships, counties, cities, and districts. All of the laws created in the 50 states can be challenged by the federal law under the Constitution.
There are over 313,000,000 Americans in the 50 states of the United States. Laws are broken down into different zones in order to represent as many people’s wishes as possible. It is inevitable that US citizens are going to have different views, beliefs, and morals when it comes to what is just and what is not. The forefathers of the US could not have know when they wrote the US Constitution that the country would become so vast and so diverse. In creating the 10th Amendment, the they set up a type of government that could become flexible in order to meet the needs and wishes of the citizens.
Comparing State Laws: Death Penalty
The subject of death penalty became a major issue in 1972. The Supreme Court suspended the death penalty from 1972 until 1976 in order to decide if the death penalty was breaking the Constitution. The 8th Amendment of the Constitution says:
“Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.”
~Eighth Amendment of the US Constitution
Some people thought that the death penalty was considered “cruel and unusual punishment”. There are 9 supreme court justices who had to debate and vote on the decision. The official ruling was 5 for the death penalty as constitutional and 4 against it. In the end they essentially decided that the death penalty was for each state to decide on its own.
Wisconsin: the first state to abolish the death penalty for all crimes.
Texas: has executed 478 people since the 1976 Supreme Court ruling.
Since the decision of 1976, there are 40 states (80% of all of the states) that have averaged at least less than one execution per year since the decision. There have been 0 executions since the 1976 ruling in 16 states (30% of the states). Here is a chart of execution totals by state since the 1976 decision:
Comparing Laws within a State: Sales Tax in California
Sales tax in the state of California show a good example of how a law, or regulation, can be different within a state.
Example: the state sales tax in California has been set at 7.25% by the state government. However, Santa Monica, a part of Los Angeles, has a sales tax of 9.25%. How is this possible?!
Santa Monica is an ‘incorporated city’. In this case, an incorporated city is essentially what most people would call a metropolis. There are additional taxes in the county of Los Angeles which total an extra 1.5%. This tax money goes to the county and metro transportation authority. An additional “Santa Monica Transactions and Use Tax” of 1% is added to the sales tax total, making the full 9.25% sales tax in Santa Monica.
Cutten, near Eureka in Humboldt County, however, has no additional sales taxes and simply uses the 7.25% tax set up by the state government.
(Source: http://www.boe.ca.gov/pdf/pub71.pdf)
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