Rights Vs English Bill Of Rights Essay

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"Natural rights are those which appertain to man in right of his existence. Of this kind are all the intellectual rights, or rights of the mind, and also all those rights of acting as an individual for his own comfort and happiness, which are not injurious to the natural rights of others." --Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, 1791. The Bill of Rights were derived from the English Bill of Rights. The Founding Fathers and the public felt that the constitution didn’t set up enough boundaries for the government, they felt that the government would assume too much power and take away the “Natural Rights” of the human. The Bill of Rights was set up to make sure the public felt safe and to make sure the government couldn’t abuse their power and turn it into a communist state or a dictatorship. America and our Founding Fathers based our Bill of Rights off the English Bill of Rights, so naturally there will be a lot of similarities between the two. Much like the Amendments in the English Bill of …show more content…

Also, the UK is a monarchy, meaning that one person serves for life but in America the president can only serve two terms of years. The Legislative bodies are very different as well; America has a Congress, with a Senate and a House of Representatives that are separate from the executive and judicial branch. Both the House and the Senate are elected bodies, and their powers are outlined in the Constitution. The British have a Parliament, with the upper House of Lords and the lower House of Commons. Members of the House of Commons are elected by their constituencies, and the leader of a dominant party in Commons is appointed by the queen to be prime minister. The House of Lords is an unelected body of people that can check the power of the Commons by reviewing and amending bills. Britain had no supreme court before 2009, the House of Lords acted as the final