The United States of America has operated under two constitutions. The first constitution was known as articles of confederation which came into force from 1st march 1781 when Maryland ratified it. The American constitution replaced this earlier version when it was ratified by New Hampshire on 21st June 1788. The two pieces of legislations were different despite having been made by the same people. The American constitution is viewed as having come to solve the loopholes that were found in the article of confederation. The articles of confederation was …show more content…
It is this problems that led the American people to draft the American constitution. First, individual states were given too much power. The powers given to the states that seemed superfluous include: power to regulate trade, power to levy taxes this powers were better left to the national government so that I would coordinate this important functions across all the individual states. too much powers given to the independent states led to conflict of laws for example in in the area of trade where there were different laws made to regulate trade in the individual states which led to conflict of laws among states which were supposed to be working as a …show more content…
Under the article of confederation most of the powers were vested on the state leaving only very few powers to exercise by the central government. The drafters did this deliberately because they feared that giving too much power to the central government would impact negatively on the sovereignty and the independence of states and give rise to tyranny like the one under King George III (Ginsberg, et. al. 2014 : 80). However starving the central government of power had negative effects. The central government was not able to enforce its demands. The inability was occasioned by lack of capacity to act directly with the people and compel obedience. The central government also lacked the power to levy taxes and this denied it means of collecting revenue to conduct its