Essay/Term paper: The central government

Essay, term paper, research paper:  World History

The Central Government


The Articles of Confederation and the Constitution are both alike and
different in some ways. Let's start out with the similarities. Firstly, both
the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution have a Legislative Branch of
Government and a Congress. Secondly, they both made changes to the government
before them. In this, I mean that when the Articles of Confederation were being
written, they used the English Government as a base, and improved from there.
They didn't want the president to be too powerful, like the king. The
Constitution made changes to the Articles of Confederation by making a stronger
government, rather than a weaker one. Thirdly, both governments had the power
to coin money, but the Articles of Confederation didn't use that power.
Now let's get to the differences. For one thing, under the Articles of
Confederation, you must need a unanomous vote under all states to make an
amendment, while in the Constitution, you only needed a majority of two thirds
of the Senate and the House of Representatives to pass it. For another, under
the Articles of Confederation, each state in congress had only one vote, while
under the constitution, the states had two votes in the senate, (where every
state is equal) and one vote per representative in the house of representatives
(where the states had representatives according to population). And for the
last thing, under the Constitution, the government could regulate trade, make
laws, and the states were more like one firm union of states. Under the
Articles of Confederation, it was competely the opposite.