Creating the Constitution

Creating the Constitution

The Articles of Confederation are decent to govern a small country but for a newer, growing country they needed to either be changed or they needed to get a new set of laws. The constitution was hereby created to help address this issue. The Articles had many flaws that started to lead to the fall of the newly born country. Luckily the constitution was here to fill in these gaps and fix the flaws.

The Articles of Confederation had many problems that made the new country go bankrupt. The main cause of its bankruptcy was that it could not tax the states to get a steady flow of money for the government and its armies. It established no type of common currency. It could not regulate interstate commerce. The articles also couldn’t levy taxes and it had only one vote per state no matter the state size or population. It had a 2/3 majority vote to be able to pass new laws. There was no system of federal courts established and there was no executive branch to enforce congress’ acts.

To fix the Articles flaws, a Constitutional Convention was arranged. Its main responsibility was to amend the articles and make a self governing constitution. The people involved in making the constitution wanted taxability. They wanted to establish a common currency that was common in all of the states and that was valid and accepted by every bank and organization in the states. The constitution also had to be able to levy taxes. They changed it so that votes were based on population for the House of Representatives.

This is where the two rival plans came into play. There was the unicameral New Jersey plan, which was similar to the way things were being governed at the moment. It had an executive committee and had equal representation for all the states no matter the state size or population. In this plan there was also no power to veto new laws that were going to be passed. Then there