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The Constitution does not mention political parties, yet they play an important role in U.S. government. They began to emerge with disputes over the ratification of the Constitution, becoming...
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The Constitution does not mention political parties, yet...
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The Constitution does not mention political parties, yet...
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In the Tenth Amendment, the Constitution also recognizes the...
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Political Parties. Political parties are such a basic part of our political system today, that many people might assume the Constitution must at least mention parties in one way or another… but there is absolutely no mention of political parties anywhere in the Constitution.
By the beginning of world war ii, the constitutions of seventeen states and the statutes in virtually all states referred to political parties—conferring rights on them, regulating their activities, or both.
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- HISTORY Vault: The American Revolution
The Constitution's framers viewed political parties as a necessary evil.
Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.
This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.
“It was not that they didn’t think of parties,” says Willard Sterne Randall, professor emeritus of history at Champlain College and biographer of six of the Founding Fathers. “Just the idea of a party brought back bitter memories to some of them.”
Bet You Didn't Know: Founding Fathers
George Washington’s family had fled England precisely to avoid the civil wars there, while Alexander Hamilton once called political parties “the most fatal disease” of popular governments. James Madison, who worked with Hamilton to defend the new Constitution to the public in the Federalist Papers, wrote in Federalist 10 that one of the functions of a “well-constructed Union” should be “its tendency to break and control the violence of faction.”
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- Sarah Pruitt
- 1 min
Aug 1, 2016 · Political parties. The Constitution does not mention parties or assign them any official responsibilities in government. The filibuster.
- 1 min
Ironically, the U.S. Constitution does not refer to political parties.³ Given all the controversy and political dissent over the years about party factions, the nation’s supreme law does not even mention them. The reason is likely that the founding fathers did not trust factions, another name for political parties.
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Jan 12, 2024 · In laying out the framework for the government of the new United States in 1789, the Constitution made no mention of political parties. Many of the nation’s founders deeply distrusted such...
