Government and Politics
The government of Massachusetts is divided into three branches: executive, legislative, and judicial. Massachusetts has a long political history; earlier political structures included the Mayflower Compact of 1620, the separate Massachusetts Bay and Plymouth colonies, and the combined colonial Province of Massachusetts. The Massachusetts Constitution was ratified in 1780 while the Revolutionary War was in progress, four years after the Articles of Confederation was drafted, and eight years before the present United States Constitution was ratified on June 21, 1788. Drafted by John Adams, Massachusetts's constitution is one of the oldest functioning written constitutions in continuous effect in the world.
In recent decades, Massachusetts politics have been generally dominated by the Democratic Party, and the state has a reputation for being one of the most liberal in the country. In 1974, Elaine Noble became the first openly lesbian or gay candidate elected to a state legislature in US history. The state housed the first openly gay member of the United States House of Representatives, Gerry Studds.
Read more about this topic: Economy Of Massachusetts
Famous quotes containing the words government and/or politics:
“Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of the government. The history of government is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is the history of the limitation of government, not the increase of it.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)
“There is a place where we are always alone with our own mortality, where we must simply have something greater than ourselves to hold onto—God or history or politics or literature or a belief in the healing power of love, or even righteous anger.... A reason to believe, a way to take the world by the throat and insist that there is more to this life than we have ever imagined.”
—Dorothy Allison (b. 1949)