Practice Test 1 - Answers. Practice Test 2 Answers. Review Packet Summer Work. Unit 1 Files. Unit 2 Files. Unit 3 Files. Answers to Unit 4 practice questions. Unit 5 Practice Test Answers. Answers to Unit 6 Practice Test.
Answers to Unit 7 Practice Test. Unit 8 Files. Explain: The House was more closely tied to the citizens because it was directly elected the Senate was not originally and the president still is not. You can also point out that the House had the shortest terms 2 years, compared to 4 and 6 meaning they must go back to the people for approval more frequently.
Also, House members must live in the state they represent the president does not and they typically represent districts smaller than a state whereas Senators represent entire states. Any one of these explanations would suffice.
The electoral college limited majority rule by putting the power of selecting the president in the hands of a small group of people electors who were all originally appointed by state legislatures, not elected by the people.
Senators, who speak for their entire state in the Senate, were originally appointed by state legislatures, not elected. Since Senate approval is required for a federal law to be passed, this limited the people's say in federal legislation, and thus was a limit on majority rule. Senators, originally appointed by state legislatures and not elected, were given six year terms and significant "advice and consent" powers such as treaty ratification and confirmation power.
Compared to House terms and powers, this put some very significant decisions out of the reach of the people, thus limiting majority rule. Unlimited majority rule in a democracy is potentially just as despotic as the unchecked rule of an autocrat or an elitist minority political party. In every constitutional democracy, there is ongoing tension between the contradictory factors of majority rule and minority rights. Therefore, public officials in the institutions of representative government must make authoritative decisions about two questions.
When, and under what conditions, should the rule of the majority be curtailed in order to protect the rights of the minority? And, conversely, when, and under what conditions, must the rights of the minority be restrained in order to prevent the subversion of majority rule? It is the question of the limits of our commitment to majority rule. It is the question of how majoritarian we should be in our public life. The question concerns two daunting quandaries that are, I hope and assume, at the center of American legal thought, education, and scholarship.
The first is the nature and purpose of a written constitution. The second is the legitimacy of judicial review, and particularly whether judicial review really does involve what has been called a "counter-majoritarian difficulty. There are those, and they might be an American majority, who believe that majority rule is the sovereign American value that trumps all others.
They believe that the degree of America's goodness is defined by the extent to which majorities are able to have their way.
Such people are bound to believe that it is the job of the judicial branch of government to facilitate this by adopting a modest, deferential stance regarding what legislatures do.
Many also implicitly believe that such an attitude should shape the attitude of courts toward what executive branch officials and agencies do. Here, judicial deference is said to be dictated by the plebiscitary nature of the modern presidency.
Many have argued that, because presidents alone are elected by a national constituency, they are unique embodiments of the national will, and hence should enjoy the maximum feasible untrammeled latitude to translate that will into policies.
So, we must ask: How aberrant, or how frequent, are abusive majorities? A related but different question is: When legislatures, which are majoritarian bodies, act, how often are they actually acting on behalf of majorities?
My belief, based on almost half a century observing Washington, the beating heart of American governance, is that as government becomes bigger and more hyperactive, as the regulatory, administrative state becomes more promiscuously intrusive in the dynamics of society and the lives of individuals, only a steadily shrinking portion of what the government does is even remotely responsive to the will of a majority.
So, paradoxically, as government becomes bigger, its actions become smaller; as it becomes more grandiose in its pretensions, its preoccupations become more minute. Ali Bokhari emigrated from Pakistan in , settled in Nashville, became a taxi driver, and got a very American idea: He started a business to serve an unmet need.
He bought a black Lincoln sedan and began offering cut-rate rides to and from the airport, around downtown, and in neighborhoods not well served by taxis. After one year he had 12 cars. Soon he had 20, and 15 independent contractors with their own cars. And he had a website and lots of customers. Unfortunately, he also had some powerful enemies. The cartel of taxi companies had not been able to raise their rates since Bokhari came to town.
Those companies, in collaboration with limo companies that resented Bokhari's competition, got the city government's regulators to require him to raise his prices and to impose many crippling regulations. She had little education and no resources, besides her talent for making lovely flower arrangements, which a local grocery store hired her to do. It threatened to close the store in order to punish it for hiring an unlicensed flower arranger. Meadows tried but failed to get a license, which required her to take a written test and to make four arrangements in four hours.
The adequacy of the arrangements was judged by licensed florists who were acting as gatekeepers to their own profession, restricting the entry of competitors. Meadows, denied re-entry into the profession from which the government had expelled her, died in poverty. But the people of Louisiana were protected by their government from the menace of unlicensed flower arrangers.
Elsewhere in Louisiana, the monks of St. Joseph Abbey also attracted government's disapproving squint. In , Hurricane Katrina damaged the trees that for many years the monks had harvested to finance their religious life. Seeking a new source of revenue, they decided to make and market the kind of simple wooden caskets in which the Abbey has long buried its dead.
But the monks were unwittingly about to embark on a career in crime. Its supposed purpose when created in was to combat diseases. It has, however, long since succumbed to what is called "regulatory capture. At the time the monks began making and selling caskets, nine of the board's 10 members were funeral directors, one of whose principal sources of income is selling caskets.
In the s, Louisiana had made it a crime to sell "funeral merchandise" without a funeral director's license. The monks would have had to earn 30 hours of college credits, and to apprentice one year at a licensed funeral home to acquire skills they had no intention of using. And their abbey would have been required to become a "funeral establishment" with a parlor able to accommodate 30 mourners.
And they would have had to install an embalming facility, even though they only wanted to make rectangular boxes, not handle cadavers. In other words, the monks would have had to stop being monks. The law requiring all this rigmarole served no health or sanitary purpose: Louisiana does not stipulate casket standards, or even require that burials be done in caskets. Obviously, the law that was brought to bear against the monks is an instrument of unadulterated rent-seeking by the funeral directors to protect their casket-selling cartel.
Rent-seeking occurs when private interests bend public power to their advantage in order to confer favors on themselves, often by imposing impediments on actual or potential competitors. Now, you may be thinking that I have wandered far from the Kansas-Nebraska Act, Abraham Lincoln, and the work of a political commentator.
But the question raised by these examples of abject rent-seeking is a question about the proper limits of the power granted to majoritarian institutions. The government action used to prevent a Pakistani immigrant from entering into his chosen profession of operating a transportation company, and the government action that blocked an aspiring flower arranger from exercising her skill and consigned her to die in poverty, and the government action that blocked the monks from supporting themselves by making and selling wooden boxes were violations of a basic right.
All three actions, and thousands like them from coast to coast, should be, but usually are not, considered unconstitutional. They should be struck down as violations of a natural right, the right that Lincoln understood as the right to free labor, the right that was, of course, at the core of the slavery crisis. It is the unenumerated, but surely implied, constitutional right to economic liberty.
But laws abridging that right survive and proliferate because courts at least since the New Deal have stopped doing their duty to defend this economic liberty against its rent-seeking enemies.
In a sense, the problem began in Louisiana 16 years before the monks' monastery was founded in It began across Lake Pontchartrain from the monastery, in New Orleans. That city had awarded some rent-seeking butchers a lucrative benefit.
The city had created a cartel for them by requiring that all slaughtering be done in their slaughter houses. Some excluded butchers went all the way to the U. Supreme Court to challenge this law.
They lost when, in the Slaughterhouse Cases, the Court, in a decision, upheld the law that created the cartel.
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