Independent agencies of the United States government

The United States of America in the Post-American Revolution was overflowing with joy, fear and cautious optimism. The world had held its breath as it watched thirteen small imperial colonies succeed in defeating the British Empire and wining its long sought after independence. Unfortunately, the defeat of Britain was only the beginning of the woes America would face. It would come down to two prominent political intellectuals of the time, Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, to take it upon…

Origins In the late 1960s into the 1970s, there was a revolutionary current throughout the college campuses in the United States. In the midst of the Vietnam War and the counterculture movement, student groups and protests began popping up around the country—and then progressively growing larger and more networked. Chief among those revolutionary leftist groups was the Students for a Democratic Society, which would become nearly synonymous with the growing youth discontent. In what would become…

Gun control has been a reoccurring issue in the Unites States for some time now. According to Paul Rosenzweig in his article, Guns: A Loaded Argument, he suggests that the issues related to gun control hardly has to deal with the amount of regulation, but more with how much power the government has to regulate individual conduct, which in his writing expresses that it should be fairly limited. Rosenzweig supports his claim by first saying that most people agree with some type of regulation on…

George Washington’s Farewell Address to the People of the United States was, in essence, Washington’s last-ditch effort to keep America going on the right path before he left office. Washington could see the growing tensions spreading across America, and he knew that factors like split political parties and foreign intervention would only cause the still very young America great stress. When Washington finally made the decision to retire from office, he left behind a series of growing issues…

Are states worth our time? Could the United States function as efficiently if states were dissolved? Ultimately, states are necessary for our federal government to function. Since the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, Founders believed in a division between governments to ensure no single entity would gain power. While a division between levels of government is needed to secure the rights of citizens, history has indicated a struggle for power between national and state institutions. The…

Since the 1600s, many states have been torn between the idea of marijuana being just a plant and harmless, and marijuana being a drug that causes substance abuse and is linked to many crimes. Some of the first federal laws against drugs were 1952 Boggs Act and 1956 Narcotics Acts which enforced that if a person was caught with marijuana in their possession they could be sentenced for a minimum of 2 – 10 years and a fine of $20,000. In 1996 California became the first state to legalize marijuana…

The war on drugs must stop, it is based off of sending vulnerable people to jail, this happens because “on the local level the war on drugs involved police operations targeting low level drug dealers, often in urban, low-income neighborhoods.” (Addiction and Substance Abuse) Marijuana legalization would reduce drug crimes. In turn allowing the police the opportunity to focus more harmful, addictive drugs out of the U.S., instead of sentencing people who were caught with 1 gram of marijuana to a…

As government in the United States of America grows more complex, conservative citizens increasingly fear that America’s government has overextended itself. They dread that they will come to live under an oppressive and tyrannical regime, and these fears are causing conservatives to react irrationally. As a result, Roger Scruton, in his article The Good of Government, sets out to assuage his fellow conservatives’ fear of American government. Scruton argues that contrary to the common…

How Federalism Changed in the Nation Federalism is “a system that balances the power and sovereignty of state governments with those of the national government. Both the states and the national government derive their authority directly from the people, and the states have considerable autonomy within their areas of responsibility” (L. Tucker Gibson and Robinson, 70). There are three types of federalisms that have changed over time for our new nation today: dual federalism, cooperative…

local and federal participants, with state-level emergency personnel functioning as intermediaries, managing network collaboration, resources, and expectations. Thus state-level emergency managers play an essential role in managing networks and collaboration among a wide range of participants in a unique, non-routine work arrangement. Because tensions often emerge between federal and local levels in emergency management situations, we have chosen to focus on state-level emergency managers as…