In 4-6 typed (double-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font, 1” margins) compare and contrast the Missouri and U.S. national constitutions and government, considering specifically how the principle of federalism is reflected in both. While you may highlight in your essay some of the key points that you made in the

“Introductory Writing Assignment” that offered five comparisons and five contrasts between the two documents and governments, your “Final Writing Assignment” should reflect vastly greater understanding of these topics. This assignment should be done as a regular narrative paper, not as a chart, or “bullet-point” fragmentary treatment. You should cite throughout apropos facts to specific page numbers in both of our textbooks. and/or in the two constitutions themselves. Finally, you should conclude with a paragraph summarizing what you have personally learned from this course, and how you might apply this learning going forward. Thank you for this, and for all of your work in this course!

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A suggestion: in preparing your essay, to review the over-arching concept of federalism, you may wish to watch the short video below, and to give your analysis of it in real time in the below “add your two cents” box.

Notice that the video, and our textbooks, both Volkomer’s work, along with that of Fulton and Brekke, stressed that federalism, as woven into the U.S. system of government at both federal and state constitutional levels, was unlike anything the world had seen before. That was a point to which “the Father of the Constitution” of the United States, James Madison too often recurred, as below:

t has been too much the case, in expounding the Constitution of the U.S. that its meaning has been sought not in its peculiar and unprecedented modifications of Power; but by viewing it, some, thro’ the medium of a simple Govt. others, thro’ that of a mere League of Govts.. It is neither the one nor the other; but essentially different from both. It must consequently be its own interpreter. No other Government can furnish a key to its true character. Other Governments, present an individual & indivisible sovereignty. The Constitution of the U.S. divides the Sovereignty; the portions surrendered by the States, composing the Federal Sovereignty over specified subjects; the portions retained forming the Sovereignty of each over the residuary subjects within its sphere. If Sovereignty can not be thus divided, the Political System of the U.S. is a Chimæra mocking the vain pretensions of human wisdom. If it can be so divided, the System ought to have a fair opportunity of fulfilling the wishes & expectations which cling to the experiment.”
–James Madison to [Nicholas P. Trist], 15 February 1830

“I always feel, an anxious hope, that as our Constitution rests on a middle ground between a Form, wholly national, and one merely Federal, and on a division of the powers of Govt. between the States in their United Character and in their individual Characters, this peculiarity of the System will be kept in view as a key to the sound interpretation of the Instrument and a warning agst. any doctrine that would either enable the States to invalidate the powers of the U. States, or confer all power on them.”
–James Madison to Andrew Stevenson, 27 November 1830