Main content
AP®︎/College US History
Course: AP®︎/College US History > Unit 3
Lesson 8: The ConstitutionThe US Constitution
The US Constitution established three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. In this video, Kim discusses how the Framers employed the concepts of separation of powers and checks and balances to limit the power of government.
Want to join the conversation?
- I think that it is very misleading in this video about the impeachment process of judges or the President. There are very high bars for doing this and that is not a remedy for a court decision that Congress or the President does not like. How many Supreme Court justices have been impeached?(12 votes)
- Only once. State and circuit court judges have been more often, but it's still very rare.(8 votes)
- One thing that was not clear - was what Congress can do with a law that the Supreme
Court decides is unconstitutional. What if Congress disagrees? What are their options if any? Does the Supreme Court have the final say and then the law becomes defunct?
That would make the Supreme Court the most powerful of the three branches if there was no recourse. Aside from packing the court with idealogical favorites which is not much of a solution in the short term and how a justice performs on the court has never been certain for any political party>(6 votes)- It means only that the law cannot be enforced. Congress doesn't have to like it. They can amend the law to bring it into compliance.(8 votes)
- If Congress passes a law - which the President vetoes. I believe that law can be returned to Congress to a) be rewritten or b) be voted upon again. How many votes are needed in Congress to override a veto by the President?(4 votes)
- About 2/3 from both House of Representatives and the Senate(5 votes)
- Can a article be changed(2 votes)
- Can't Congress override a law with a vote(which is rare)?(1 vote)
- Congress can make a new law, and if it is either signed by the chief executive or passed by more than two thirds of each house, and further is determined to be in line with the constitution when challenged to the supreme court, it can change anything.(2 votes)
- It seems like these checks and balances are no longer function, as we can see impeachment proceedings seem to be controlled by ruling party interests. Does this suggest that the US would need to change its constitution in order to create a system where checks and balances are effective and prevent abuses of power?(0 votes)
- The same argument could apply to the impeachment of President Clinton in the late 90s, and to the threatened impeachment of President Nixon in the 70s. As horrible as things are now (in 2020), the republic still stands. Give it time.(4 votes)
- hi i lernd thinggs yay(1 vote)
- Can't Congress override a law with a vote(1 vote)
- Congress can repeal a law with a 2/3 majority vote in both houses, or with a 50.1% vote in both houses plus a presidential signature. However, this is a lesson about the constitution, which is harder, much harder, to amend. This was set in place by the framers of the constitution to keep the governance of the nation "above" the level of "what any individual congress or president might want."(1 vote)
- when she says congress can impeach the president does that mean fire him? if not can someone explain.(1 vote)
- There are two actions. The first, "impeach" means to decide to accuse someone of wrongdoing that could remove her or him from office. If the accusation is proven, in an impeachment trial, THEN the second action, removal from office, can be considered. Three US presidents in history have been impeached (accused): Johnson in the 1860s, Clinton in the 1990s, and Trump in 2020 and 2021. and trials have been conducted. None of those men was convicted, so the USA has never removed a president from office after impeachment. The FACT that an impeachment trial was held, though, has not been erased from history.(1 vote)
- I am wondering where in the Constitution the power of the Judicial branch to declare laws unconstitutional comes from? After all, it took a decision of the early Supreme Court to affirm the court had this power. It is somewhat surprising in that in England courts did not have the power to nullify laws passed by Parliament. Obviously the SC has come to have this power, but what alternatives were vetted before the SC asserted it had this power? Does anybody know what the Federalist papers said on this topic?(1 vote)
Video transcript
- [Teacher] In the last
video we discussed the great compromise made at the
Constitutional Convention in 1787, where delegates who were
trying to craft a new governmental system for the
United States agreed on how the legislative branch of the
government would be set up, and the agreement they made was
that it would be a two house or bicameral legislature with
a House of Representatives, where the representatives
would be apportioned based on state population,
and then a Senate where every state would get two
senators regardless of its size. This is just one example
of how the framers of the constitution tried to
introduce a notion of balance. In this video, I wanna zoom
out a little bit and look at the broader constitution,
because the legislative branch was really only one part of it. In fact, there are seven more
articles of the constitution. So here, I'd like to spend
some time taking a closer look at some of the other articles,
paying special attention to the executive branch
and the judicial branch, but before we do that, I
just want to take a moment to marvel at the size of the constitution. Not because it's so big,
but because it's so small. This is the first page
of the constitution, famously starting with, "We
the people," but the entire original constitution
could fit on four pages. Compare that to the constitutions
of many other nations which are hundreds of pages long, and I think the idea here
in having a constitution that's really only seven articles long was that it was gonna set down principles. This wasn't going to be a
whole set of laws that outlined everything that a state
should do in any situation but rather a set of
broad ideas around which lawmaking decisions could happen. In a way, you could
think of the constitution as being kind of broad
enough to be flexible. They spoke in larger
generalities that could be applied to many different situations, and I think the proof that
this was a good way to think about putting together a
constitution is just in the fact that we'd still have
this constitution today, more than 200 years after
it was written in 1787. The US Constitution is the
oldest constitution in the world that is still in effect
at the national level. I think that's a pretty big deal. How did this constitution work? Well, let's look a little bit
more closely at these first three articles and the branches
of government they created. One of the ways that the
framers of the constitution attempted to remedy the problems
caused by the single branch government under the
Articles of Confederation was creating a three branch government. One branch, established in Article 1, would be the Congress
and within this building is the House of
Representatives and the Senate. And this would be in
the eyes of the framers, really the most powerful of the branches. They gave Congress the power to make law, to tax, to raise an army, to coin money. They really envisioned
that most of the day to day operations and most of
the power of government would fall under the duties of Congress, but one thing that the
Articles of Confederation had lacked was a powerful executive, so the second branch of government, established in Article 2
is the executive branch, the head of which is the president. The job of the executive
would be to enforce or carry out the laws made by Congress, and that would include doing
things like waging war. Remember that the first
president was George Washington, who had been the General of
the Revolutionary Armies, but the president could also
kind of have the front lines on dealing with foreign nations,
so negotiating treaties, and would also have the power of appointing many government officials. And lastly, the third branch
would be the judicial branch of government, established in Article 3. The head of the judicial branch
would be the Supreme Court, the highest court in the land. Of course, there are
many other smaller courts below it at the state and district level. The Supreme Court's job,
along with other courts, would be to interpret the
law, to see whether or not things done by Congress and the president fell within the bounds
of the constitution. And the framers really thought
that the judicial branch would end up being the
weakest branch of government, although both the presidency
and the Supreme Court have grown in power over the years. Now, this is an incredibly brief overview of these three branches. These articles include lots more in them about the specific powers
of each of these branches and the kinds of
requirements one would need to become a representative or president, so I highly recommend
that you read more about the Constitution and
check out these articles. But what I want you to get out
of this is that the framers here were trying to separate
the powers of government, so they wanted to make sure that to avoid having too much power in government. Remember that they are trying
to escape from the monarchy. They want to make sure
that government power is kind of diffused among
these three branches with the idea that they're
going to have to argue with each other to get things
done, they're going to have to cooperate with each
other to get things done, so the separation of
powers is one of the key principles of the Constitution. Another key principle
is checks and balances. What do I mean by checks and balances? Well, this is the idea
that each of the branches of government has the power
to check in the sense of stop, like checkmate in chess, the
other branches of government. I think of this as kind of like a giant governmental game of
rock, paper, scissors. Now, there are many ways
that these branches can check each other, but I just
wanna give a couple of quick examples to help you understand
what that might be like. Alright, say that Congress makes a law, and the president doesn't like that law. The president can use the power of the veto to kill that law, and if Congress gets annoyed
enough with the president, they might use their power
to impeach the president. What about the judicial branch? The judicial branch's
main checking function is declaring laws unconstitutional. The president or Congress may put through a law that the Supreme Court says is not consistent with the Constitution. The judicial branch can then kill that law by declaring it unconstitutional. What happens if the other
branches are unhappy with the judicial branch? One way that the president
can check the judicial branch is through appointing judges. This would kind of change
the composition of the court, the people on the court, and so over time, the presidency can influence
who is on the Supreme Court and how they rule on laws. And lastly, if Congress isn't
happy with the Supreme Court, they might be able to impeach justices, or change jurisdiction
of the lower courts. In this way, like the
separation of powers, the framers intended to make sure that one branch couldn't get too powerful, because it would be able to
check the other branches. You could really think of
this as being a brilliant way of harnessing peoples' natural inclination to look out for themselves. As rivalries developed,
as people tried to do what they thought was
best, they could help keep government honest by
fighting among themselves, and as they all strove
and checked each other, it would keep all of government
from becoming too powerful.