Source: https://www.theconstitutionproject.com/author/greg/
Timestamp: 2019-04-21 15:23:57+00:00

Document:
Check our new film on one of the most famous and foundational cases in the history of the Supreme Court, McCulloch v. Maryland. In 1791, Alexander Hamilton founded a National Bank. Pretty simple, right? But this simple act set off a fight over who had power over whom, the States or the newly-formed Federal Government. The answer lay in one line in Article VI of the Constitution: The Supremacy Clause.
Learn more in our new film The Supremacy Clause: McCulloch v. Maryland.
On December 15, 1791, the Bill of Rights, the first ten Amendments to the Constitution, was adopted after being ratified by three fourths of the states. Support for a Bill of Rights gained momentum during the ratification process, with many Framers and state legislators arguing that the new Constitution needed to do more to guarantee certain freedoms for citizens. Originally twelve Amendments were proposed, by the original first and second Amendments, which discussed numbers of Congressional Representatives and Representative and Senator pay, were not adopted at the time.
Watch our film, The Bill of Rights to learn about the fight behind this landmark founding document, and the rights it’s intended to protect.
Acclaimed Civil Rights reporter Roy Reed passed away this week at the age of 87. Roy Reed was an award-winning author and journalist, covering many of the defining moments of the Civil Rights era, including the March on Selma. Read more about Reed’s life and work here.
And see Roy Reed speak about the integration of Little Rock Central High School in our film An Independent Judiciary.
The Supreme Court hears oral arguments today in a case that could reshape how legislative districts are drawn in the United States. Every ten years, when the U.S. does a census, political maps across the country are redrawn by state legislatures. This gives the political party in control of the state legislature enormous power because they are the ones who get to decide how these new districts will be drawn. Now, the Supreme Court has ruled that you can’t draw districts based on racial lines (something they reenforced two times last term). But making districts that benefit one party over the other by diluting the impact of the minority party’s vote? That’s been totally legal.
Today the Supreme Court will hear a challenged to the way Wisconsin drew its legislative map in a case called Gill v. Whitford. Following the last census in 2010, the Republican-controlled Wisconsin legislature redrew their districts map is such a way that, in 2012, Republicans carried less than half of the overall vote (48.6 %) but won nearly two thirds of the seats in the state assembly. The Supreme Court is set to decide whether maps like Wisconsin’s are unconstitutional.
230 years ago today, delegates to the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania signed the Constitution of the United States.
Celebrate the birthday of our foundering document and check out our latest film in The Constitution Project series, The Confrontation Clause: Crawford v. Washington.
Full Text of the Original Document.
Watch our new film about the Confrontation Clause!
Check out our new film The Confrontation Clause: Crawford v. Washington. You can find the whole film streaming online for free at the Annenberg Classroom website. The film tells the story of how we got the right to confront our accusers in court (and what happened to one famous person who didn’t have that right). But what happens when your accuser isn’t a person but a taped confession?
50 years ago, Thurgood Marshall (1908-1993) became the first African American to serve on the Supreme Court of the United States when he was confirmed by the Senate on August 30, 1967. Marshall was one of the most prominent legal minds of the Civil Rights era, winning 29 of the 32 cases he argued before the Supreme Court. In 1952, he argued the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education (1954), which overturned segregation and the doctrine of “separate but equal” that had ben in place in the South since Plessy v. Ferguson (1896). Marshall served on the Court for 24 years.
Learn more about Brown v. Board of Education in our film An Independent Judiciary.

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