United States of America (Government Branches) 2018

Reuploaded from the Ama Duniya Magazine in November 2018 at age 12, unedited from back then.

Today, we will be talking about the United States of America, the Three branches of government.

We'll go more into each one and find out lots of information.

Let's go over the 3 branches of government.

First would be the Executive Branch, the President of United States is the head of that branch.

Second would be the Legislative Branch, which Congress runs.

Last but not least, is the Judicial Branch.

We'll go over more of each one now.

Executive Branch

The executive branch consists of the president, vice president and 15 Cabinet-level departments such as State, Defense, Interior, Transportation, and Education. The primary power of the executive branch rests with the president, who chooses his vice president, and his Cabinet members who head the respective departments. A crucial function of the executive branch is to ensure that laws are carried out and enforced to facilitate such day-to-day responsibilities of the federal government as collecting taxes, safeguarding the homeland and representing the United States' political and economic interests around the world.

That's pretty much all of the information about the executive branch, the Cabinets are like advisors to the President of United States. They enforce the laws.

Legislative Branch

The legislative branch consists of the Senate and the House of Representatives, collectively known as the Congress. There are 100 senators; each state has two. Each state has a different number of representatives, with the number determined by the state's population, through a process known as "apportionment." At present, there are 435 members of the House. The legislative branch, as a whole, is charged with passing the nation's laws and allocating funds for the running of the federal government and providing assistance to the 50 U.S. states. They create the laws, they represent the people. Keep in fact that this is a Representative Democracy, I'll explain that now.

Direct democracy or pure democracy is a form of democracy in which people decide on policy initiatives directly. This differs from the majority of most currently established democracies, which are representative democracies. This means that every citizen votes on laws, bills, and a bit more. That isn't our government, as citizens can't decide on everything.

We have a Representative Democracy, which we elect people to do the job for us.

Let me explain.

Representative democracy (also indirect democracy, representative government or psephocracy) is a type of democracy founded on the principle of elected officials representing a group of people, as opposed to direct democracy.

That means that people do the job for us, that is what I mean by Representative Democracy.

Last but not least, we have the Judicial Branch.

The judicial branch consists of the United States Supreme Court and lower federal courts. The Supreme Court's primary function is to hear cases that challenge the constitutionality of legislation or require interpretation of that legislation. The U.S. Supreme Court has nine Justices, who are chosen by the President, confirmed by the Senate. Once appointed, Supreme Court justices serve until they retire, resign, die or are impeached.

The lower federal courts also decide cases dealing with the constitutionality of laws, as well as cases involving the laws and treaties of the U.S. ambassadors and public ministers, disputes between two or more states, admiralty law, also known as maritime law, and bankruptcy cases. Decisions of the lower federal courts can be and often are appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court.

This pretty much includes the court's system, the Supreme Court is the highest court in the United States of America.

We have a system that checks each branch to make sure they don't get too much power. I will be explaining that now.

Why are there three separate and distinct branches of government, each with a different function? The framers of the Constitution did not wish to return to the totalitarian system of governance imposed on colonial America by the British government.

To ensure that no single person or entity had a monopoly on power, the Founding Fathers designed and instituted a system of checks and balances. The president's power is checked by the Congress, which can refuse to confirm his appointees, for example, and has the power to impeach or remove, a president. Congress may pass laws, but the president has the power to veto them (Congress, in turn, may override a veto). And the Supreme Court can rule on the constitutionality of a law, but Congress, with approval from two-thirds of the states, may amend the Constitution.

We used to have the Articles of Confederation, but that didn't work out well as it caused many problems.

That's all you need to know about Democracy, Checks and Balances, and the main 3 branches of the United States of America.

Credit to ThoughtCo and Wikipedia for the information.

Thank you for reading, by Ishaan Padhi, 2018.