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The First Ten Amendments

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Recommended: Importance of the Bills of Rights

The individual freedoms guaranteed by our founding fathers and written in the constitution, become the first causalities when our leaders decide to declare war. The first ten Amendments of the Constitution, commonly known as the Bill of Rights are the foundation of this nation’s laws, and is the benchmark of how our government treats the citizenry. Many times in our history leaders took actions to suspend personal freedoms in the name of “war”. A few examples are, the killing and repatriation of the Native American, the Japanese and German internment camps during World War II in the name of war and national security concerns. For the purposes of this paper the main focus will be on the time from the 1950’s to today. We will look at the …show more content…

The founders of our country believed these rights so important, that they wrote them into the Constitution to prevent the government from becoming too strong. The Judiciary has the responsibility (Supreme Court) to ensure laws do not violate the Constitution, Each court must take into account the Bill of Rights when determining if a law is unconstitutional. While each amendment is very important we will only focus on the three aforementioned amendments, the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of religion, speech, press, the right to assemble and the right to petitioning the government for redress of grievances (Legal Information Institute 2015). The Fourth Amendment provides individuals with the right to be secure in their persons against unreasonable search and seizure (Legal Information Institute 2015). The Fifth Amendment stipulates that no person can be held for a crime unless indicted by a Grand Jury or be required to self-incriminate, and lastly cannot be deprived of life, liberty or property (Legal Information Institute 2015). How can leaders take these freedoms when our borders are secure and no foreign army has invaded our territory? Leaders believe that using the terms Cold War, the War on Drugs and The War on Terrorism gives them the authority to disregard the constitution. The individual freedoms guaranteed by our founding fathers these freedoms become the first causality when our leaders decide to declare war. The US fought the war against Communism during the Cold War principally through proxy wars; however, in the 1950’s Congress waged their own fight against the ideology on the domestic

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