AP Government UNIT 1 REVIEW

well hello and welcome to hi mystery in this video we're gonna review the entire contents of unit 1 for your AP government exam and I'm gonna explain everything you need to know in three sections so first we're gonna look at foundational ideas in American government second we're gonna do a survey of the Constitution and then third we're gonna look at the idea of federalism and these videos have study guides which is part of an ultimate review packet which is linked down below now I highly recommend that you get the review packet because if you do that means you can follow along with what I'm doing and also there's practice problems in there and I will go through all of them tell you which ones are right which ones are wrong and give you all the help that I can so if that's something you want then the link is down below in the description all right let's get to it all right let's start with the foundational ideas so there's two foundational ideas that you really need to know there's limited government and there's representative democracy so let's start with limited government our governmental system here in America is based on the concept of limited government which is exactly what it sounds like it's the government but limited as Americans we value a government that's not all up in our business the way Americans think about things is that the power to govern is in our own hands and we want to transfer as little of that power as possible to the government now underneath the concept of limited government there are four ideas that really influenced the founders I'm going to tell you about each one of them now first natural rights this was the idea that human beings by virtue of being human beings have been given certain rights by the divine and that's an important distinction to make because if those rights come to us from God that means that they do not come to us from the government and therefore cannot be infringed upon or taken away by a government the second idea under limited government is popular sovereignty now if you know the meaning of those two words separately then you'll know what they mean together so popular means people sovereignty means power so popular sovereignty means power of the people it's basically the idea that the power to govern resides not in the hands of a king or a magistrate but in the hands of a people the third idea under limited government is social contract this idea basically says that since the power to govern is in the hands of the people that it is up to us to take some of that power and give it to a governing official and when we do that we're essentially signing a contract with the government that says listen we're giving you power which means you agree then to uphold our rights and fourth the idea of rip public anism was very important to the founders a republican government is a government in which the people elect representatives to do the work of government for them now don't get confused because when I say Republican government you're tempted to think that it has something to do with the Republican Party but it doesn't we'll get to them later when I say republicanism all I mean is is that we elect representatives to do the work of governing in our place so just be careful there now it's gonna be very important for you to know where these ideas show themselves in two of the required documents for your curriculum these four ideas show up most clearly in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution it's in the Declaration of Independence that we find most clearly the concept of popular sovereignty you may remember that place where Thomas Jefferson writes that legitimate governments exist by the consent of the governed now that phrase consent of the governed very important to have someone's consent on something means you have their agreement so that means a government that is there by the consent of the people is one of which people submit to the government not because they're forced to but because they choose to okay also the Declaration of Independence you have natural rights pumping up according to Jefferson people are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights and just for poops and giggles you should know that Jefferson got those ideas from a guy named John Locke who said that there were certain unalienable rights that among those were life liberty and property apparently Jefferson didn't like the third of those and so he changed it to life liberty and the pursuit of happiness but wait there's more there's also the social contract in the Declaration of Independence that's the whole section which Jefferson explains that if a government infringes upon the natural rights of the people that it is the right of the people to overthrow that government and establish a new and then to get a good view of republicanism we need to go to the Constitution and essentially the whole of the Constitution is the blueprint for Republican government so we'll get to that in the next section now there's one more thing we need to deal with here in the foundational ideas section of this video there are essentially three kinds of representative democracies that you must understand number one is participatory democracy number two is pluralist democracy and number three is elitist democracy and these are essentially three different ways of understanding how a government which derives its power from the consent of the governed ought to work so participatory democracy emphasizes a broad participation among as many people as possible they say if one ought to have a voice and to say in how things go a pluralist democracy emphasizes group participation pluralists would say that like-minded groups of people ought to vie for power and since none of them can get everything they want this will inevitably lead them toward compromise in more centrist positions elite democracy emphasizes limited participation in government this is the opposite of participatory democracy the participatory folks want everyone to have a voice but the elitist would say that's cute and while all y'all hippies are out there hugging trees and dreaming of rainbows let us remind you that in reality only a few people who live close to the levers of power actually get to crank them now the manifestations of all three of these exists somewhere in our government today and depending on the time period you're looking at one of them is more emphasized than the other for example today you hear lots of people complaining that our government is dominated by competing interest groups and they have way too much influence over our lawmakers now which one of the three is that I'll wait that's right it's pluralist did you say it if you didn't get it right I revoke my presence anyway it's gonna be important for you to know where to find examples of all three kinds of democracies you can find examples of them in the constitution and then in two other required documents Federalist number 10 and Brutus number one in the Constitution you see the participatory model in the House of Representatives which directly represents the voice of the people but you can also see the elitist model for example in the electoral college the electoral college takes the election of the president away from the people and puts it in the hands of a few electors and you can see the pluralist model debated in Federalist 10 and Brutus won in Federalist 10 Madison is concerned about the danger of factions and what he says is that the best way to control the mischief of factions is by having a large republic delegating the governing authority to representatives and dispersing power between state and federal governments Brutus 1 on the other hand argued for a more popular democratic theory it argued that what we needed was a small decentralized republic because a large centralized republic will be a danger to the people's Liberty and as it turns out the people were more persuaded by James Madison in Federalist 10 and that brings us to the second section of our review of the Constitution so where did the Constitution come from well the first thing you need to know is that our Constitution was not in fact our first Constitution it is in fact our second Constitution our first Constitution was a document called the Articles of Confederation which is another required document and it governed us for the first eleven years of our nation's history and the big idea to remember about the Articles of Confederation is that because our states had kind of a monarchy hanging over right after the Revolutionary War we didn't want to invest the central government with too much power so under the Articles of Confederation the states were very strong in the central government the federal government was very weak now this document was a hot mess but there are two particular parts of that hot mess that you need to remember first on to the Articles Congress had no power to tax nor to gain any tax revenue whatsoever the federal government had to go knocking on the state's doors and asking nicely for them to give tax revenue and you can imagine how that went the second part of that hot mess that you need to know is that under the Articles there was no provision for a standing army and that problem became evident and a little episode called Shay's rebellion they don't need to rember the whole story of Shay's rebellion all you need to really remember is the fact that when that happened when the angry farmers rose up and caused a great commotion Massachusetts called up the federal government said hey send some troops to help us with this thing and guess what there weren't any so this got the wealthy folks especially a little twitchy because they could see that with the economy fluctuating the way it was that there was a lot more potential for this kind of uprising to occur and if there was no help from the federal government because it was so weak that was gonna be a problem so everybody began to realize that because of Shay's rebellion we really needed a new central government with more power invested in and that brings us to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 led by our good buddy George Washington as all the states sent delegates to the Constitutional Convention under orders to modify the Articles of Confederation but as are a good buddy Alexander Hamilton who once he unleashed his charming Wiles all over the delegates persuaded all of them that what we needed was not a revised Articles of Confederation but a new constitution altogether and so the delegates set out to write it now before we get into what the Constitution actually says you need to know that this is a document that is full of compromises and there are four very important compromises that you must know the first compromise you need to know is the great compromise there are some delegates at the convention who wanted a congress in which the states were represented by population and not surprisingly it was the big state delegates who wanted this other delegates wanted to Congress in which the states were represented equally and not surprisingly it was the small state delegates who wanted this so the great compromise was the blending of the two positions it said that Congress will be made up not of one house but of two houses one house would represent the state's population which would end up being the House of Representatives and the other would represent the states equally and that was the Senate the second compromise you need to know was the compromise on the election of the president the system make him up whether something we call the electoral college and that means that the president is elected not by the people but by specially chosen delegates called electors chosen by each state the third compromise you need to know was the infamous three-fifths compromise so many of the states in the South thought that their voice would be drowned out in the Congress because the northern states were far more populous than they were in the south so the southern solution of this problem was to count up the whole slave population and add that to the rest of the population to say that's how many seats we get in the House of Representatives northerners heard that and they were like are you so crazy but in order to keep the southerners from walking away from the Constitutional Convention over this issue they came up with a compromise known as the three-fifths compromise and basically what it said was this as the southerners could count up all the slaves and take three-fifths of that number and that's what they could add to their population for the sake of representation and the fourth compromise you need to know which is related to the last one is to compromise on the importation of slaves it won't surprise you to know that many of the northerners wanted to abolish the slave trade but many of the southerners one of the slave trade untouched so the compromise they came to we just won't talk about it for the next 20 years we'll bring it up again in 1808 okay so those are the only compromises that exist in the Constitution but those are four of the most important that you need to know about now because they fought so hard about these things it became abundantly clear to them that they needed a way to amend to the Constitution if necessary so if you go look at article 5 of the Constitution that's where the process for changing or amending the Constitution is laid out it's a two-step process first is proposal second ratification so first the constitutional amendment must be proposed and there are two ways that a proposal can happen either two-thirds of both houses of Congress can propose an amendment or 2/3 of the state legislatures can propose an amendment and if you can only get remember one of those remember the first one the two-thirds of both houses of Congress can propose an amendment because that's the only one that said happen then secondly an amendment is ratified if three-fourths of the state legislators agree to it alright so now let's get into how the Constitution actually works we're gonna dive a lot deeper into the details of this in the next unit so we're just gonna look at the basics here so the big idea of the Constitution is this division of power and checks and balances so when our government power is separated between three branches the legislative the executive and the judicial and because all the power isn't concentrated in one branch that means that each branch checks and balances the power of the others now the need for this separation in this checking power is outlined for us in Federalist 51 which is another required document it was in Federalist 51 that Madison famously said if men were angels no government would be necessary and because Madison understood that human beings are less like angels and more like a race of sentient turds you argue is that the best way to uphold the liberty of said turds is to separate power among three branches of government and in that way no one branch can tyrannize the other for example if the president ends up being a turd that means Congress can impeach the president and if necessary remove him from office and now let's look at the specific powers granted to each branch of the government by the Constitution and the first kinds of powers we'll look at our exclusive powers and that's exactly what it sounds like it's powers that are given exclusively to one branch like to this branch and not this one and not this one let's start with the exclusive powers given to Congress and just for poops and giggles you can find this in article 1 section 8 of the Constitution it's there we find that Congress has among other things the power to collect taxes declare war regulate commerce among the states and most importantly make laws now the exclusive powers of the President or the executive branches laid out in article 2 there we find that the president's the commander-in-chief of the armed forces that he is the one responsible for negotiating treaties and perhaps most important the president has the power to enforce the laws made by Congress in order to execute the laws the president must take the bills given to him by Congress and signed them but if those bills are repugnant to him he does not believe that they should be law he also has the power according to Article two to veto those bills and that means they would not be binding as law now the exclusive powers of the judicial branch are all laid out in article 3 and to tell you the truth it ain't much the founders assumed that the judicial branch we'll be the weakest of all the branches of government so they didn't actually give it that much power in the Constitution really all you need to know here is that the justices of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President and serve life terms on good behavior we actually have to go outside of the Constitution to see where the judicial branch got its real power and that means we need to talk about the required case of Marbury vs. Madison in 1803 now the details of this case are an extremely important what you really need to know is that in this case the Supreme Court struck down a law that Congress had passed and said that that law was unconstitutional it was at that moment that the judicial branch grew into the power that the other two branches had it was because of that case that the Supreme Court became the final interpreter of the Constitution to say whether or not laws passed by Congress are constitutional or unconstitutional and that power is called judicial review and thus ends section two of our review now let's move to Section three federalism now my advice for you before we start studying federalism is this don't be that guy you know the guy I'm talking about he's the guy when you say the word federalism thinks a man about to talk about the federal government no we're not about to talk about the federal government federalism as a concept only talks about the division of power between state government and national government has nothing to do with the federal government now I know it's very confusing because the word federalism sounds like federal government but it is not the federal government federalism does not equal federal government federalism equals the division of power between state government and national government don't be that guy now this division of power between federal government state government is provided for by the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution which says that any power that is not specifically mentioned in the Constitution is belonging to the federal government is therefore reserved to the state governments for example issuing driver's licenses has nothing to do with the federal government that's all a state level government issue but although power is separated between the federal government the state government there are also some powers that are shared between the two and those are called concurrent powers an example of that is our favorite thing taxation both the federal government taxes you and the state government taxes you now the balance of this division of power has changed over the course of our history and when we talk about this we tend to talk about cake so in the early years of our nation's history the Federalists division of power was like a layer cake yes there was that tasty section in the middle where both layers came together but for the most part the federal power stayed on the federal layer and the state power stayed on the state layer but right around the time of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency we moved to more of a marble cake federalism in this way the federal government started reaching down into the bottom layer and state government started reaching into the top layer so that if you look at a cross-section there are definitely still two different cakes but it's hard to tell where one starts and the other stops and I guess that's the only two cakes they can think of because now what we have today is called fiscal federalism now fiscal means money and money is basically how the dynamic of federalism works today and it mainly has to do with the federal government offering grants to the states and there are basically two kinds of grants that make fiscal federalism work there are block grants and there are categorical grants a block grant is a bunch of money given to a state by a federal government that doesn't have many strings attached it's money given to specific communities but the state largely decides how it will spend that money on the other side is categorical grain in this kind of grant Congress decides largely how the state will spend that money and if the state accepts that money there are strings attached for example in the 70s the federal government offered money to the states for highway repair but in exchange the states had to agree to set speed limits on those highways to 55 miles an hour now when it comes to federalism there are four key constitutional provisions that you must be aware of there's the Tenth Amendment the Fourteenth Amendment the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause now we just talked about the Tenth Amendment so let's start with the 14th amendment in terms of federalism the 14th amendment is very important because it applies the liberties contained in the Bill of Rights to the States now remember that the Bill of Rights the first 10 amendments of the Constitution which we'll look at more closely in unit 3 remember that that particular document provides rights for citizens and protections from the federal government but it was the 14th amendment that took those federal protections and applied them then to the states next let's look at the commerce clause now this has to do with the right of Congress to regulate interstate commerce there have been some very significant times especially during the civil rights movement where Congress has used that ability to regulate interstate commerce to make the states fall in line with the federal agenda and then finally in terms of federalism we need to know the Necessary and Proper Clause now this tasty little nugget comes at the end of article 1 section 8 which if you'll remember outlines the exclusive powers given to Congress right there at the end after it lists all the explicit powers given to Congress like these are the actual things they can do then at the very end it says and Congress can make any laws which are necessary and proper to the execution of all those things we just listed ok so those are the key constitutional provisions you must know in terms of federalism in order to close this review I'm going to give you two Supreme Court cases that illustrate how the federalists division of power has shifted between the state government and federal government over time the first case is McCulloch versus Maryland in 1819 in this case Maryland decided that it didn't want a branch of the National Bank operating in the state so it tried to destroy the bank by taxing it to death now that much isn't so important what's important is that the Supreme Court ruled in favor of national power in this case saying that federal law trumps state law with regards to the bank the second case is the United States versus Lopez in 1995 now this is a case about carrying guns on school property but again that's not what's important what's important is that in this case the commerce clause was invoked to try to overwhelm state power with federal power but in this case the Supreme Court said that the Commerce Clause cannot be used to prohibit guns on school campuses thus they ruled in the opposite direction of McCulloch versus Maryland in this case state power was upheld over against federal power all right if your brain hurts by this point that means you're doing it right if you want more videos like this that'll help you get a 5 on your exam in May and help you get an A in your class then subscribe and I will oblige if you have any questions leave them in the comments below and I will be happy to answer them catch you on the flip-flop you

Channel: Heimler's History

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Keywords: ap gov, ap government, ap government review, ap government unit 1, ap gov unit 1, test, ap gov exam, study, ap government study guide, jacob clifford, acdc economics, constitution, federalism

Id: kQ1yYvyXiNs

Length: 19min 24sec (1164 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019