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	• NEWS >> ATW September 11, 2008 Yearly Script Program Index -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- OPEN/WELCOME Hi and welcome to a special edition of Assignment: The World. I’m Teej Jenkins. To ensure the success of our nation, our founding fathers placed the powers of the government into three distinct branches; the legislative branch, the judicial branch and the executive branch, each of which have their own function and purpose. Executive Branch (Prof. Danny Hayes) (Prof. Danny Hayes) The executive branch is the President and all of the people who work for the President. This includes cabinet secretaries like the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State. It also includes all of the different departments that make administrative rules and regulations and essentially run the government on a day to day basis. One of the ways we can think of what the President does is the President wears many hats. The President is the symbolic head of government. So, he plays an important cultural role in terms of putting a face on the government for the citizens. But he is also the Chief executive. That is he is the person formally in charge of the day to day operations of our government. That doesn't means he’s down there signing paperwork all day or getting his hands dirty with the various details of every department in the government, but he is the one who sets the course for the operation of the federal government. One of the ways he does that is by being the chief author of the budget of the US which allocates money to different things. So he has quite a bit of influence over how the government works that way. So he’s the symbolic head of state, he's the chief executive which means he has a lot of administrative responsibility, he's also the commander in chief which is another critical role. According to the Constitution, the President is given authority over the military and so he has decision making power over where troops are sent, what kind of things the United States does with its military force. So those are critical roles. He also has an important role to play in terms of maintaining the United States relationship with other countries. He not only has to worry about things going on in the US, but he also has to make sure the US's place in the world is respected and that he helps promote peace and the countries national interest even when that falls beyond the country's borders. So the President wearing many hats means that on a day to day basis he really has to do a lot of things and juggle a lot of different roles and responsibilities. A president is only one person so he can only do so much. So in order to effectively run a very sprawling bureaucratic operation, he needs some way to delegate authority and to put people in place who can oversee. So cabinet officials are the highest ranking members of various important departments. So the secretary of state is the chief diplomat in the US. This is the person who shuttles back and forth to other countries dealing with the US's foreign policy, trying to maintain good relations with our allies and promote peace and security throughout the world through diplomatic negotiations with other world leaders. The secretary of defense runs the army. He takes his orders from the President, but he is in charge of the day to day military capability of the US. That’s not something the President could do on his own, on a day to day basis, because he simply would have too much to do. So the idea of having a cabinet is this is a trusted group of advisors who not only run the departments to which they are charged with controlling, but that they are also advisors to the President who can give him advice on what kind of policies should be pursued, what he should do in terms of various issues that should come up in the world or domestically within the US. ATW FACT #1 The last department created in the executive branch of our government was the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 2002, in response to the attacks of September 11th, 2001. This department exists to prepare for, prevent, and respond to domestic emergencies, like natural disasters and terrorism. INTRO The U.S. is made up of 50 unique states, each of which has their own climate, products, people and geography. The legislative branch exists to give each state and its citizens a voice in the federal government. Legislative Branch (Prof. Danny Hayes) We have what is known as a bicameral legislature which means there are two houses of Congress, the House of Representatives and the US Senate. The framers of the Constitution decided to compromise and they created what is now known as the Great Compromise, where they decided to create two chambers in the legislature. The Senate would be based on equal representation for the states, that is, each state would get two senators but the House would be based on population size. So for example, NY which is a large state, has 29 representatives in the US House of Representatives. Smaller states, such as South Dakota or Wyoming, only have one representative each because they have many fewer people that live in those states. So that is why in the US, we have a bicameral legislature. So the legislative branch is the primary law making branch in the US. It has the power to make laws. What that means is any law that is passed by the federal government, has to be approved by both houses of Congress. Some of what the framers were trying to do is make it very difficult for massive changes in public policy to occur very quickly. They wanted to make it essentially very difficult for dramatic changes in public policy, with the idea being that policies are best changed incrementally and by setting up these various differences in the House and Senate, that is what they were seeking to do. For the most part, the House and the Senate have similar lawmaking power. The one major exception to that is tax policy. All tax bills, bills dealing with revenue, that’s the way its stated in the Constitution, that is where the US gets its money, has to start in the House of Representatives. The idea there is what the framers saw as the most burdensome thing that government did was tax its citizens. To take portions of their income in order to provide government services. Because they felt like the House of Representatives would be the body that was quote unquote the house of the people, the chamber that best represented the public, they wanted to make sure that any tax bills, bills that would raise and lower taxes, would start in the House and not the Senate. So that’s the one big exception to the lawmaking powers that the house and Senate have. So any substantial changes to policy, such as how much in terms of taxes that people pay or any other rules or regulations that govern our lives, whether new laws or things like that has to be approved by both houses of Congress. The idea there is that in a system like ours, the representative democracy, that laws should reflect the will of the people. Since we have a representative democracy where there's elected officials chosen to go to Washington and make those decisions, the argument is that in order for any law to be put in place, it should have the support of the majority of both houses. Because laws and regulations have to be passed by both houses of Congress, Those laws have to be debated both in the Senate and in the House. So the more debate there is, the idea is, the better the solutions to the public policy problems will be. More people have the opportunity to have a voice, and more different opinions are offered, then ultimately, the government will make better decisions. POP QUIZ #1 The President of the United States of America has a number of duties, included are: the symbolic head of state the chief author of the national budget all of the above And the correct answer is number 3….the President is responsible for all of these duties and more. That is why the cabinet exists. Members of the cabinet act as advisors to the President and are in control of the various departments that exist in the executive branch. INTRO As the legislative branch is the branch of government that creates laws, it is the duty of the judicial branch to enforce and interpret the laws they create. JUDICIAL BRANCH (Judge Feldman) Well the judicial branch is one of the three branches of government. It has a separate function than the other two branches which are the legislative branch and the executive branch. The judicial branch's primary responsibility is to resolve disputes. The judicial branch handles generally two kinds of cases, criminal cases in which the state or prosecutor seeks to punish someone for committing a crime and civil cases in which people are injured or harmed in some way and they're seeking compensation or some other form of relief. (Prof. Danny Hayes) And so what these courts do is they hear these cases from the two sides of a dispute and they render a decision based on their interpretation of the law. (Judge Feldman) The federal government is divided into different levels of court, kind of like the steps on a ladder. At the bottom step is the district courts. There's over 90 districts courts in the US. The district courts are the trial level courts, that’s where the cases start, where the trials occur. The circuit courts are the courts which hear appeals. Every losing party in any case, whether it’s a criminal case or a civil case has the right to appeal the decision to the next level up which in the federal system is the circuit court. The circuit court is a panel of three judges. It’s not a trial, but the judges listen to what happened at the trial and decide whether the trial was fair or that there was a mistake made. Once the circuit court hears the case, it’s usually over with, even though there’s this next step on the ladder known as the Supreme Court of the United States. Each side is given a chance to go to the Supreme Court to ask the Supreme Court to hear the case and the Supreme Court gets thousands of parties asking them to hear the case, but generally takes very few. The reason is the Supreme Court generally only hears cases where there’s an important constitutional issue or whether maybe some of the circuit courts have disagreed over an issue and they need to resolve it to get uniformity within the federal system. But very few cases get taken to the Supreme Court even though many lawyers and litigants and parties ask the Supreme Court to hear their case. (Prof. Danny Hayes) The courts play a very important role in the US because in many ways politics is often grey, it’s not black and white and the interpretation of the Constitution is also not always straightforward. So by interpreting laws and interpreting the Constitution, the Supreme Court and other federal courts play a very important role in shaping the way that policies and laws are actually implemented in the US. Something that is necessary or there wouldn't be a way to resolve many of the disputes that occur in American politics. You can think of the court system as the primary forum for resolving disputes between both people and institutions in the country. One of the things they do additionally as part of resolving those disputes and giving some mechanism for resolving those concerns is that they protect the rights of citizens. The Constitution affords what are known as civil liberties to its citizens. That is freedom's from government interference in our lives; freedom of speech, freedom o f expression, and freedom of religion. Those are thing s that the Constitution protects for citizens, but without a court system, there would be no mechanism to enforce those rules and so what the courts do is they make sure that the government, that other people, don't violate those basic civil liberties that we have. That’s one of the most important things that an independent court system which we have does. POP QUIZ #2 In our federal legislature, representation in the Senate is equal between states, but in the House of Representatives, it’s based on… the actual size of the state the size of the population of the state how many registered voters are in the state And the correct answer is number 2….The number of representatives each state can have in the House of Representatives is determined by how many people live in that state. POP QUIZ #3 Our federal court system is made up of different levels of court; the highest court in the land is… the Supreme Court the District Court the Circuit Court And the correct answer is number 1….The Supreme Court is the highest court in the land. It is comprised of nine justices who are appointed by the President, approved by Congress and serve life terms. GOOD-BYE Each branch of our federal government has it own powers and responsibilities. Each branch is designed to limit the powers of the other two, ensuring that no one branch becomes too powerful. This system has been instrumental in the success of the United States of America. That’s it for this week’s show. From all of us here at Assignment: The World, I’m Teej Jenkins. Have a great week! © 2008 WXXI-TV/ Assignment: The World. All Rights Reserved.