Balance and Counterbalance the Government and the People A FREE lesson your learners will always remember! A New DVD Film, Death March from Bataan to Manchuria: Raising a Survivor’s Voice Directly and indirectly, the people from the Enlightenment helped our Founders realize and solve many problems. America's Founders had to figure out a way to balance and counterbalance the government and the people. A true democracy brought a complicated mix of governmental powers; correct one defect and it offsets something else. The majority of our Founders, ultimately, developed a responsiveness to powers weighed against each other. They tempered the responsive tug of implausible idealism with realism in froming needed barriers that must divide power distributed among several governmental departments. If they allowed overcompensation of one element of governmental rights then individual rights would suffer. The Federalist No. 51, February 6, 1788 The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments, Independent Journal, James Madison wrote: "A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions." Similar to a discrepant event lesson, democracy sat flat, at first, a big puzzle balanced precariously on a rickety ship. Thomas Reid wrote that democracy would work, but it depended on the people. The people had to be able to use common sense. Americans had to know how to figure things out. We all needed to trust each other, as well as trust our own judgment, to work together to find solutions: teamwork. John Marshall was American's forth Supreme Court Judge. During Marshall's first year, Americans began to realize that we needed our Supreme Court Judges to find out what happened, or what might happen, instead of simply acting as a referee. During Marshall's time as Supreme Court Chief Justice, 1801-1835, he earned our respect by his integrity and his interpretation of the Constitution. John Marshall turned out to be better than a referee. Marshall set the standards for America's Supreme Court Judges with his analytical mind. Every case that reached John Marshall turned into a discrepant event inquiry. In defining judicial nature when it concerns a judge's willingness to "factor in the Court's institutional role," Justice John Roberts recently offered the following: "A Supreme Court Judge must suppress his or her ideological agenda or desire for personal attention in the interest of achieving consensus and stability. It's the difference between being a judge and being a law professor." (The Supreme Court Law, Power & Personality by Jeffrey Rosen.) An extraordinary PBS series exploring America's highest court: Supreme Court, PBS Back to main Power Problem Solving What are America's Strongest Links? Teachers and Power Problem Solving Inquiry and Democracy A Revolution in Learning by Jean K. Bruce Free Discrepant Event, Friends, anti-smoking & tobacco Professor William C. Bruce Jean K. Bruce Mindtronics! and Inquiry Alive!

We had to check King George