In The United States of America
In 1789, James Madison presented to the First United States Congress a series of ten Amendments to the United States Constitution, today known as the Bill of Rights. After enumerating specific rights retained by the people in the first eight Amendments, the Ninth Amendment and the Tenth Amendment summarily spelled out the principle of limited government. Together, these two last Amendments clarify the differences between the unenumerated (as well as enumerated) rights of the people versus the expressly codified delegated powers of the federal government. The Ninth Amendment codified of the people do not have powers are expressly delegated to the federal government specifically by the Constitution. Government can do some things and not others.
The Constitution limits the power of the government in several ways. It prohibits the government from directly interfering with certain key areas: conscience, expression and association. Other actions are forbidden to the federal government and are reserved to state or local governments.
Read more about this topic: Limited Government
Famous quotes containing the words united, states and/or america:
“Madam, I may be President of the United States, but my private life is nobody’s damn business.”
—Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886)
“If the Union is now dissolved it does not prove that the experiment of popular government is a failure.... But the experiment of uniting free states and slaveholding states in one nation is, perhaps, a failure.... There probably is an “irrepressible conflict” between freedom and slavery. It may as well be admitted, and our new relations may as be formed with that as an admitted fact.”
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)
“My dream is that as the years go by and the world knows more and more of America, it ... will turn to America for those moral inspirations that lie at the basis of all freedom ... that America will come into the full light of the day when all shall know that she puts human rights above all other rights, and that her flag is the flag not only of America but of humanity.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)