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:
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“So the brother in black offers to these United States the source of courage that endures, and laughter.”
—Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960)
“The Americans are violently oral.... That’s why in America the mother is all-important and the father has no position at all—isn’t respected in the least. Even the American passion for laxatives can be explained as an oral manifestation. They want to get rid of any unpleasantness taken in through the mouth.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)