House of Representatives and The Senate

Ashford University House of Representatives and The Senate Questions

Choose lour of the following questions and answer each one with a clear and thoughtfully worded paragraph. Write in a way that would explain the matter clearly to an outsider. Reminder: You may look up information from any desired source, but every answer has to be your own original way of explaining the information. Answers that are found to be copied or closely paraphrased from any outside source, or that show evidence of collaboration between students, will be disqualified from receiving any credit.

1. The Constitution, as written in 1787, did not give the new national government any power to abolish slavery. In some ways it protected slavery, but it did not give the slaveholders everything that they might want. Summarize the provisions concerning slavery, including ways that the original Constitution protected slavery and the mild ways in which it allowed Congress to interfere with slavery. Your answer should include, but not be limited to, an explanation of what the three-fifths rule actually signified. (When answering questions about the Constitution, always describe and explain the provisions in your own words rather than quoting directly from the document.)

2. The framers of the Constitution designed the House of Representatives and the Senate to be different from each other in some fundamental ways. Explain the structural differences between the House and the Senate, as provided in the original Constitution, and the reasoning behind them. (Your answer should concentrate on what was in the original Constitution, as drafted in September 1787 and ratified in 1788. It should include one key provision concerning the Senate that is no longer in effect now.)

3. The power of Congress to enact a federal minimum wage and the power of Congress to prohibit racial discrimination in privately owned stores and restaurants are both supported by the same clause of the Constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court since the 1930s (unlike before). What is that clause, and what is the specific way of interpreting it (which the Court did not always allow) that gives Congress this power?

4. From time to time the Supreme Court hears a case in which it must decide whether to allow or prohibit a display on public property (that is, property owned by some level of government) involving a cross, a nativity scene, or some other religious symbol. Sometimes the Court allows that symbol to stay; other times the Court rules that it has to go. On what constitutional basis is the challenge to such a display likely to be brought, and what reasoning, as defined by existing case law precedent, is the Court likely to use to decide whether to allow or prohibit the symbol to stay on public property?

5. If a radical is making speeches calling the US government illegitimate and saying that it should be overthrown, and if authorities bring charges against this speaker and the case ends up in federal court, what rule from prevailing case law is likely to be applied in such a case, to determine whether this individual's First Amendment rights have been violated? (Please be clear that this is a hypothetical case. You have not been given enough information to resolve it, and you are not being asked to resolve it. Rather, you should explain what question, based on precedents studied in class, the federal courts would have to consider in order to resolve it.)

6. If police obtain a search warrant and obtain evidence against a suspect, but that search warrant is later shown to have had a technical defect in the way that it was issued, is there any possibility that the evidence obtained with that warrant can still be admissible in the trial? Identify the specific rule of case law that would be most applicable to such a situation

7. With attention to the specific historic circumstances in this country, as well as to the constitutional issues, why is there a close connection between African American civil rights and federalism, and where does the Fourteenth Amendment fit in with this close connection?