Hello class, Professor Kinto here. I'm going to hopefully put together just a relatively brief video and this is going to be essentially just an overview of the Constitution and really what I'm trying to accomplish is simply show you how it's structured. It's actually, structure-wise, it's a pretty simple document. Frankly, it's not that long. It's only a handful of articles and then it's got some amendments and for a country that's 230, 240 years old, there aren't really that many amendments.
So as we work our way through this semester, we will zero in or we will zoom in and expand on certain parts of it. But here in this first unit of the semester, all I'm trying to do is give you a sense of how it's put together, some key ideas, and not only how it's structured, but how we came about with the wording that we now have. So A constitution, as I'll probably remind you multiple times in other presentations, a constitution is essentially going to do two things.
It's going to establish government, and then it's going to provide operating instructions for that government. The United States Constitution is the underlying and foundational law for government, for state governments and for the national government. Now, all the states are going to have their own state constitution, but as we learn as we work our way through the semester, The U.S. Constitution is the supreme law of the land.
And whenever states join the Union, so Texas joined the Union in 1845, any time that states join the Union, essentially what those people in that state are doing when they join is they're pledging allegiance to the Constitution. Now, of course, the Constitution can be amended. People aren't happy with the wording. They can amend it, but it takes a lot of effort and a lot of work. and three-fourths of the states to actually amend the Constitution.
So that's a hard obstacle to clear. It's a tough hurdle. But this is an overview of the U.S. Constitution.
It's going to create government, and it's going to provide operating instructions for government. Okay, so all I'm going to do here is walk you through an introduction to each of the articles and say just a handful of things about the amendments in general. So another thing I want you to consider in this introduction is that when they ratified the Constitution, so it's drafted in 1787, and then it's fully functional really in 1789, just a couple years later. What they were trying to do is establish some security and some reliance.
They didn't want there to be any question about the nature of the government, the national government, and the role that the states... have in this union. And so one of the best ways to do it is to put the basic law into writing, and that's what you have here. And then to make sure that it will endure from generation to generation.
That's what you have there. To secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and to our posterity. It will provide some stability by having it in writing.
Who tells us what this means? Because some of the wording is... Here, some of the wording is vague. It's not a perfect document. So ultimately, the U.S.
Supreme Court is going to tell us what the Constitution means. They're going to interpret it, and in particular, in specific cases, they will apply it. And the U.S.
Supreme Court is very busy these days, and as they've been for a very long time, telling us what the meaning of the Constitution is. And we'll look at some of those cases as we work our way through the semester. This is about stability for their generation and future generations. Okay, so let's just walk you through these articles.
So Article 1, the very first article, creates the legislative branch and it simply says that all legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in the Congress of the United States and that Congress is going to be divided into two parts. So as we work our way through the semester, like I said, we're going to zoom in and expand on certain parts of the Constitution. We will certainly come back. and look at Article 1, which deals with Congress, again, and in more detail. Okay, I've scrolled down to Article 2. Again, this is the second article, and what we would typically refer to as the second branch of government.
Article 1 was the legislative branch, and now this is the executive branch. Article 2 is all about the executive branch. And a constitution is going to do two things. It's going to create government and then provide operations. instructions for government and that's true for all three all three branches so when you look at the Constitution every Every single word, every sentence should be doing one or two things.
Either addressing how government is created and how people will find positions in government. Is that going to be election? Is it appointment? And also, once they get in there, what their job is. So Article 2 is about the executive branch.
And I'll just read the first part. The executive power should be vested in a president of the United States. And that's all executive power, by the way. And when we get into Unit 2, we'll talk more about this vesting clause, what it actually means in real life in 2024. So Article 2 is the second branch of government, and it addresses the executive branch.
Now here we are in Article 3, and I've got to tell you, this is the Judicial Branch, Article 3, and it's a very, very short article. That's all there is to it. So Article 3, the third branch of government, the Judicial Branch. So that's the order, legislative, executive, judicial. It simply says in this first section, the judicial power of the United States shall be vested in one Supreme Court and in such inferior courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish.
established. So when we are in that part of the semester where we deal with the judicial branch, we will come back and zoom in and expand on that portion exactly. So again, this is intended as an overview. Okay, so those three branches or those three first three articles are really about just the creation of the three branches and some information about the relationship with one another and what their general purpose is. And we will learn more about that working our way through the units.
So Article 4 and what follows Article 3 are, I would say, miscellaneous provisions. So just as an example, Article 4 here is really all about... the states. Remember you got 50 in the beginning you had 13 states now of course we have 50. So how do the states play into this? How are, what's the dominant power?
So these are some of the things that these articles are going to address. So when we look at federalism we'll take a closer look at this but article 4 Roman numeral four here, article four is all about the states. You can see a reference to the states here and you can see a reference to the states here.
So article four really addresses the states. And when we get to federalism, I'll come back and look at that. Article 5 addresses, among other things, the amendment process.
So there are several steps that must be taken. in order to amend the Constitution, but Article 5 is going to address the amendment process. As I said a moment ago, one of the reasons it's so hard to amend the Constitution is because you have to have 75 percent or three-fourths of the states agree to change it, and that is a very, very tough thing to accomplish, but it has been accomplished before. There has to be a lot of agreement across the country in all the various states.
states that that the Constitution needs to be changed in order for it to change because you can see here that the states are going to have to ratify those proposed amendments Article 6 is another miscellaneous provision and one of the things that is most important to this, and we'll look at this in federalism, is this is where you find the Supremacy Clause. This is where the Constitution itself declares itself, really, and a couple other categories of law, to be the supreme law of the land. But remember, whenever any state joins the Union, As I said a moment ago, they're giving deference to that.
There are benefits and there are detriments to joining the United States of America. One of the benefits of joining the United States of America is you've got 49 other states that are going to fight for you in case you get invaded. the national government overall that's going to fight for you. One of the detriments is there are some instances where a state may pass a law only to discover that that law that they have passed is contrary to the U.S. Constitution.
That's happened multiple times. times. So this establishes the U.S. Constitution as the supreme law of the land and a couple other categories of law. But when we get into federalism, we'll take a closer look at this.
So Article 7 of the Miscellaneous Provision is about that initial, the initial of this Constitution in live class time or other parts of the unit that we're in, if this is an online class, I will definitely address the convention itself. Okay, so that is the main body and as you're aware, the U.S. Constitution has been amended. So let's look at some of those amendments very, very quickly.
The U.S. Constitution has been amended 27 times, and I've made the printer smaller so you can scroll through it. So I'll scroll through it and just show you. These are all the amendments, and essentially when something is amended, is an amendment. It's either going to be in addition to the actual body, those articles I just showed you, or perhaps a modification of the language that is in that original body.
So all these amendments are going to do one of those two things. They're either going to add to the wording or they're going to alter the wording. of the original Constitution. As I've said, it's been amended 27 times, which in my opinion is not that much for a country as old as ours, 230 years or so.
So just a couple more things, and then we're going to call it quits because I know we're going to address these. The first thing I want you to note is that the very first amendments to the U.S. Constitution, and we're talking about 1791, These were ratified. This is the Bill of Rights, so that's Amendment 1 through 10. So Amendments 1 through 10 were added to the U.S. Constitution in 1791. That's two years after the main body of the Constitution was ratified.
So that's not much time at all, just two years essentially. After two years have passed, we've already added ten amendments. Now after that... Which means we got, after 1791, we add 17 more. Again, that's not that many.
There's a reason for that because it's very, very hard to change it. All right, so I think that's all we're going to do and there will be other opportunities where we're going to look more closely at. the specifics in the constitution but i wanted you to have a sense of the layout it's not that complicated and like i said we're going to zoom in and we're going to expand