[32] Individual state legislatures independently laid embargoes, negotiated directly with foreign authorities, raised armies, and made war, all violating the letter and the spirit of the Articles.

[citation needed] In September 1786, during an inter–state convention to discuss and develop a consensus about reversing the protectionist trade barriers that each state had erected, James Madison questioned whether the Articles of Confederation was a binding compact or even a viable government.

[citation needed] A Committee of Eleven, including one delegate from each state represented, met from July 2 to 16[44] to work out a compromise on the issue of representation in the federal legislature.

[44][46] Toward the close of these discussions, on September 8, a Committee of Style and Arrangement, including Alexander Hamilton from New York, William Samuel Johnson from Connecticut, Rufus King from Massachusetts, James Madison from Virginia, and Gouverneur Morris from Pennsylvania, was appointed to distill a final draft constitution from the 23 approved articles.

In the state of New York, at the time a hotbed of anti-Federalism, three delegates from the Philadelphia Convention who were also members of the Congress—Hamilton, Madison, and Jay—published a series of commentaries, now known as The Federalist Papers, in support of ratification.

[69] As 1788 began, Connecticut and Georgia followed Delaware's lead with almost unanimous votes, but the outcome became less certain as leaders in key states such as Virginia, New York, and Massachusetts expressed concerns over the lack of protections for people's rights.

The Due Process Clause of the Constitution was partly based on common law and on Magna Carta (1215), which had become a foundation of English liberty against arbitrary power wielded by a ruler.

Historian Daniel Walker Howe notes that Benjamin Franklin greatly admired David Hume, an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher, and had studied many of his works while at Edinburgh in 1760.

[88] Following the Glorious Revolution of 1688, British political philosopher John Locke was a major influence,[89] expanding on the contract theory of government advanced by Thomas Hobbes, his contemporary.

[99] While the ideas of unalienable rights, the separation of powers and the structure of the Constitution were largely influenced by the European Enlightenment thinkers, like Montesquieu, John Locke and others,[82][100][101] Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson still had reservations about the existing forms of government in Europe.

[110][111] John Napoleon Brinton Hewitt, who was born on the Tuscarora Indian Reservation, and was an ethnologist at the Smithsonian Institution's Bureau of Ethnology is often cited by historians of Iroquois history.

[113][114][115][116][117][118] Coined by Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, who chaired the convention's Committee of Style, the phrase is considered an improvement on the section's original draft which followed the words We the People with a list of the 13 states.

Financially, Congress has the power to tax, borrow, pay debt and provide for the common defense and the general welfare; to regulate commerce, bankruptcies, and coin money.

It is to provide for naturalization, standards of weights and measures, post offices and roads, and patents; to directly govern the federal district and cessions of land by the states for forts and arsenals.

It validates national debt created under the Articles of Confederation and requires that all federal and state legislators, officers, and judges take oaths or affirmations to support the Constitution.

[131] The language of the concluding endorsement, conceived by Gouverneur Morris and presented to the convention by Benjamin Franklin, was made intentionally ambiguous in hopes of winning over the votes of dissenting delegates.

This two-fold epoch dating serves to place the Constitution in the context of the religious traditions of Western civilization and, at the same time, links it to the regime principles proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.

[133] Thus, when the Office of the Federal Register verifies that it has received the required number of authenticated ratification documents, it drafts a formal proclamation for the Archivist to certify that the amendment is valid and has become part of the nation's frame of government.

This certification is published in the Federal Register and United States Statutes at Large and serves as official notice to Congress and to the nation that the ratification process has been successfully completed.

[142][143] Requested by several states during the Constitutional ratification debates, the amendment reflected the lingering resentment over the widespread efforts of the British to confiscate the colonists' firearms at the outbreak of the Revolutionary War.

[146] The Fifth Amendment (1791) establishes the requirement that a trial for a major crime may commence only after an indictment has been handed down by a grand jury; protects individuals from double jeopardy, being tried and put in danger of being punished more than once for the same criminal act; prohibits punishment without due process of law, thus protecting individuals from being imprisoned without fair procedures; and provides that an accused person may not be compelled to reveal to the police, prosecutor, judge, or jury any information that might incriminate or be used against him or her in a court of law.

The Anti-Federalists persisted, and several state ratification conventions refused to ratify the Constitution without a more specific list of protections, so the First Congress added what became the Ninth Amendment as a compromise.

Specifically, the apportionment constraints delineated in Article 1, Section 9, Clause 4 have been removed by this amendment, which also overturned an 1895 Supreme Court decision, in Pollock v. Farmers' Loan & Trust Co., that declared an unapportioned federal income tax on rents, dividends, and interest unconstitutional.

Adopted at the urging of a national temperance movement, proponents believed that the use of alcohol was reckless and destructive and that prohibition would reduce crime and corruption, solve social problems, decrease the need for welfare and prisons, and improve the health of all Americans.

John Marshall in Virginia, James Wilson in Pennsylvania and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut all argued for Supreme Court judicial review of acts of state legislature.

[citation needed] "This argument has been ratified by time and by practice ..."[n][o] The Supreme Court did not declare another act of Congress unconstitutional until the controversial Dred Scott decision in 1857, held after the voided Missouri Compromise statute had already been repealed.

Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes addressed the Court's limitation when political process allowed future policy change, but a judicial ruling would "attribute finality".

While he would concur with overthrowing a state supreme court's decision, as in Bush v. Gore, he built a coalition of Justices after 1994 that developed the idea of federalism as provided for in the Tenth Amendment.

[205] It informed Abraham Lincoln during the American Civil War,[v] his contemporary and ally Benito Juárez of Mexico,[w] and the second generation of 19th-century constitutional nationalists, José Rizal of the Philippines[x] and Sun Yat-sen of China.

[212][220] Levitsky and Ziblatt argue that the US Constitution is the most difficult in the world to amend, and that this helps explain why the US still has so many undemocratic institutions that most or all other democracies have reformed, directly allowing significant democratic backsliding in the United States.