Article I Section 2 (#02)

Before we start, let me apologize for not posting last week. I was sick. http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html

Article I Section 2

What it means

Remember the word "prerequisite"? Well, "requisite" means any requirements.
Enumeration essentially means all items in a list.

Those two terms defined, here's what this section means:
The House of Representatives, mentioned in Section 1, is completely reelected every two years, and Electors are required to have any qualifications necessary in order to be Electors (more on Electors in future posts, when I get to the Electoral College). Of course, there are no specifications of how many electors are allowed, or of whether or not the entire population of a province of the United States can be the electors. Just so you know, province is synonymous with state here, as in the state of California. I avoided the term "state" because the technical definition of "state" is country.

Representatives need to be/have been:
• 25 years old
• a resident of the USA for seven years or more
• a resident of the state (again, and forevermore referring to province in this blog) they were elected to at the time of elections

Censuses take place every ten years, and representatives comprise no more than one Representative for every 30,000 residents, and each state gets at least one Representative.
The House of Representatives gets to choose its own officers.

How it's been broken

As far as I'm aware, this section has never been broken. Ever. And it would be pretty obvious if it were.

Article I Section 1 (#01)

http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html

Article I Section 1

What It Means

Quite simply put, all this means is that a Congress which was to be created (and has now existed for a couple of centuries) has:

• Two bodies
  • A House of Representatives
  • A Senate
• All powers to create laws

Simple, right? Even though I couldn't find any cases where this has been broken, you guys can feel free to discuss cases in the comments section. As a reminder, here's what doesn't violate this:

• Any Court ruling that simply interprets what the Constitution says, and doesn't go beyond this (example: Roe v. Wade. Despite at first appearing to violate this in 3. a-c, Roe v. Wade simply attempts to make it easier for the court to decide in the future)
• Executive orders taking no legislative action outside the executive branch, as the president has the power to order his employees around. (I'm certain there's been some. I just couldn't find any, as I was a bit crunched for time when writing this.

The Preamble (#00)

Hi! For those of you wanting to know where I'm reading the constitution, I'm using the government archives at http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html. I will always use this page to read the Constitution, as I don't have a print copy handy.

Anyways, in this section we will cover the preamble of the Constitution, or section 00.

Let's break this down into sections:

in Order to . . . do ordain and establish

This means that the writers are about to declare their purpose for writing the Constitution.

The above may seem silly, but it's important to know that the writers of the Constitution had specific purposes in mind. Otherwise it would be very hard to interpret the body of the Constitution. Here's a paraphrase of the reasons, in order.

1. The writers wanted to promote national unity
2. They wanted to not only continue, but ESTABLISH justice. This means that presumably, the Articles of Confederation had erred here.
3. They wanted to protect peace within their borders.
4. They wanted to be able to protect against invasion, whether internal or external.
5. They wanted to increase general health, happiness, and wealth.
6. They wanted to be able to pass down freedom to themselves and their offspring.

And that's the preamble. It's kind of hard to break something that doesn't actually do anything. Therefore, I'm going to leave out any historic infractions this time, primarily due to lack of them (although there is one big one called the Civil War).

Hi.

This blog is intended for one purpose, and one purpose only: to inform Americans on what the Constitution  of the United States says, and of laws/policies/events that violate the Constitution.

This blog will not be used to push my political views, although they might leak through via my interpretation of the Constitution.

Here's a breakdown of exactly what will be posted in this blog after this post:

1. Posts interpreting sections of the Constitution, along with historical laws that have broken this section. These will be labeled with a number. The biggest number they're labeled with will be their number. Other numbers they're labeled with will be numbers of sections that relate to this section.
2. New laws/policies/events that violate the Constitution, with an explanation of how they violate it along with a label of the sections they violate.

I'm sure everything will become much clearer as I post. Feel free to comment on any post with your own opinion on what was discussed, as long as you can be mature about any disagreement.

I should post every week on Mondays (Pacific Time), but please excuse me if I don't get to this blog every week.