What are the main functions of a constitution?
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The Functions of the Constitution
1. Separation of Powers
The Government of the United States, the federal government, is divided into three branches: the executive power, invested in the President, the legislative power, given to Congress (the House of Representatives and the Senate), and the judicial power, vested in one Supreme Court and other federal courts created by Congress. The Constitution provides a system of checks and balances designed to avoid the tyranny of any one branch.
Most important actions require the participation of more than once branch of government. For example, Congress passes laws, but the President can veto them. The executive branch prosecutes persons for criminal violations, but they must be tried by the courts. The President appoints federal judges, but their appointment must be confirmed by the Senate.
2. Division of Federal and State Power
Another important function of the Constitution is to divide power between the national government and the state governments. This division of authority is referred to as “federalism.” The federal government is very strong, with much power over the states, but at the same time, it is limited to the powers enumerated in the Constitution. Powers not delegated to the federal government, nor prohibited to the states are reserved to the states or to the people. Although the powers of the federal government are limited to those enumerated in the Constitution, those enumerated powers have been interpreted very broadly. And under the supremacy clause of the Constitution, federal law is supreme over state law. State or local laws that conflict with the Constitution or federal statutory law are preempted.
The Constitution also limits the powers of the states in relation to one another. Because the United States Congress has been given the power to regulate interstate commerce, the states are limited in their ability to regulate or tax such commerce between them. Under the Constitution’s privileges and immunities Clause, states are prohibited from discriminating in many ways against citizens of other states.
3. Protection of Personal Liberty
The third main purpose of the Constitution is to protect the personal liberty of citizens from intrusions by the government. A few of these protections are found in the main body of the Constitution itself. For example, Article I, sections 9 and 10 prohibits both ex post facto laws, which punish conduct that was not illegal at the time it was performed, and bills of attainder which single out individuals or groups for punishment..
Most Constitutional protections for individual rights are contained in the Bill of Rights, which constitute the first ten amendments to the Constitution. These amendments were adopted shortly after the adoption of the Constitution itself, in response to state concerns about the Constitution’s lack of protections for individual rights. The protections of these amendments were originally interpreted to apply only against the federal government, but the Supreme Court has since ruled that most of them were made applicable to the states by passage of the Fourteenth Amendment due process clause after the Civil War. The Fourteenth Amendment also contains the equal protection clause, which protects citizens from discrimination by the states on the basis of race, sex and other characteristics.
4. Permanent Protections of a Constitution
In a democracy without a written constitution, such as the United Kingdom, the legislature may pass laws granting or taking away any rights, or even changing the structure of the government itself. A Constitution is more difficult to alter, and the framers of the American Constitution made it especially difficult to amend. An amendment must first pass both houses of Congress by a two-thirds majority and must then be ratified by the legislatures of three-fourths of the states. In a sense, this makes the Constitution an anti-majoritarian document.
By binding the hands of future generations, it prevents a majority from granting tyrannical powers to the government in a time of crises. It also prevents a majority from easily taking away the rights of minorities. And it prevents those in office from holding on to power by increasing their terms in office.
A document that is so difficult to amend can become obsolete over time, if it is too detailed and inflexible. For the most part, however, the Constitution is written in terms general or abstract enough to retain a core set of values yet be amenable to changing interpretations as called for by the times.