A New Country Free from Tyranny

A New Country Free of Tyranny
In the summer of 1787, fifty-five men representing twelve of the newly independent thirteen states gathered in Philadelphia and took on the challenge of framing a constitution that satisfied the people’s need for a tyranny-free government. Just coming out of a revolution and out from under the power of a king, the delegates were determined to create a government free of “the accumulation of all powers…in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many…”. Further reason that called for a new government was that the existing constitution, the Articles of Confederation, was not strong enough to hold this new nation together. It lacked an executive chief, a court system, and any sort of control over taxes on the states. Their challenge was this: create a government strong enough to support a new nation without digressing back to a tyranny in any form. James Madison’s ideas of separation of power became the starting line towards liberty. Our founding fathers constructed a constitution that guards against tyranny by creating separate powers between central government and state, legislative, judicial, and executive branches, and the House of Representatives and the Senate.
By separating the powers between a central government and state governments, the constitution benefits the people by giving them a measure of self-government closer to home. Powers given to the States included holding their own elections, establishing their own schools, and passing marriage and divorce laws . This provided the people with a “double security”, meaning that along with being able to govern laws directly related to life within each state, they would be able to wield a certain measure of power over the central government as well . This compound system of government is known as federalism and prevented either the people or the executive government from gaining too much power over the other .
Within the central government, power had to be regulated as well. With the massive responsibility of controlling all of the states, the central government would need a structure that guarded against tyranny, and thus we have the Legislative, Judicial, and Executive branches. The legislative branch makes and enacts laws, the judicial branch determines whether something is constitutional or not, and the executive branch enforces decisions made . Although each of the branches has a specialized function, they all keep each other in check. The legislative branch has the power to impeach the President or override a veto, while the Executive branch can veto its legislation. The executive branch nominates the judges of the judicial court but can have its acts be declared unconstitutional. The legislative branch has the power to confirm the President’s nominations in the judicial court but can also be declared unconstitutional . With all of these checks on each other, the three branches of government are efficient in governing an entire nation without accumulating too much power in the hands of one office.
As history has also showed us, misrepresentation in a government is just a detrimental as war. The founding fathers had to design a way in which each state would have equal representation in congress while at the same time representation had to be proportional to population. They decided congress would be sectioned into the House of Representatives and the Senate. In the House, each state would send one representative for every thirty thousand people that lived there. This satisfied the populations in the larger states such as Virginia, which had ten representatives in the House. But what about the smaller states like Rhode Island and Delaware? These states only had one representative each, but had just as equal a voice in the Senate as the larger states. In the Senate, each state would have two representatives regardless of their populations . This sharing of power between the states allowed no room for tyranny over the smaller states because of their equal representation and opportunity in the Senate.
The constitution guards against not only harsh tyranny in the hands of one dictator, but tyranny in all its forms, whether it is absolute power in the hands of a king or simply a majority denying the rights of a minority. By separation of power, on every level of government, the rights of citizens and leaders alike remain untouched by tyranny.