Civics In A Year
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?
Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.
Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.
Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
Civics In A Year
The Blueprint: Understanding America's Limited Government System
What makes the American system of government unique in world history? Dr. Justin Dyer, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin and dean of the UT Austin School of Civic Leadership, returns to our podcast to unpack the founders' vision for limited government.
Dr. Dyer reveals how the founders created two distinct models of limited government operating simultaneously. At the state level, governments possessed broad authority over "health, safety, and morals," limited primarily through separation of powers and state bills of rights. The national government, however, was designed with the opposite presumption – possessing only those powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution, with all others reserved to the states.
This dual approach to limiting government power reflects the historical context of thirteen former colonies becoming a unified nation while maintaining their independence. Dr. Dyer expertly explains why the founders were particularly concerned with limiting legislative power through specific enumeration in Article I, Section 8, while granting more general authority to the executive and judicial branches. The conversation explores how they sought to balance limiting federal authority while ensuring it remained effective in crucial areas like foreign policy, defense, and interstate commerce.
Whether you're a student of history, politics, or constitutional law – or simply a curious citizen – this conversation provides essential insights into how America's governmental system was designed to protect liberty through carefully crafted limitations on power. Listen now to gain a deeper understanding of the constitutional framework that continues to shape our nation.
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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership
Welcome back everyone. We actually have Dr Justin Dyer, who has been on our podcast before. Dr Dyer is a professor of government at the University of Texas, austin and also the dean of UT Austin School of Civic Leadership. So, dr Dyer, thank you so much for coming back. Today's question is looking at limited government. So our question is why did the founders want to create a limited government?
Speaker 2:Well, for two different reasons maybe. One is that when they were creating new governments at the state level, they're writing constitutions and they're thinking about ways to distribute power among different branches of government so that no one branch would become too powerful, that there would always be a check on the way that power is exercised. But that looks slightly different at the state level than it does at the national level. So for them there's this phrase that people would use until recently that the states had authority over the health, safety and morals of the community, that the power that the state exercised was for the health, safety and morals of the community, that the power that the state exercised was for the health, safety and morals of the community. It was a pretty broad sense of what the power of the state would be, and it would be limited by the way that power is exercised by three branches of government.
Speaker 2:At the national level it was very different. All of the states at the time sent delegates to a convention, who then the delegates are deliberating about what kind of national government they want, and that national government looks a lot different. It's not a government of broad plenary powers, as they used to describe that as a power over the health, safety and morals of the community. It was instead a government of limited and enumerated powers that the Constitution says specifically. Here are the powers of the national government, and then all the other powers are still reserved to the states. So in that sense you get a limited government in a different kind of way at the national level, that it's a government only with the powers that are given to it by the people.
Speaker 1:So when you talk about the states and their limited government, did all of the states have kind of that same overarching like health, safety and morals is really what we're responsible for?
Speaker 2:This is yeah, that's a phrase that you get up until. You probably still see it in some places, but people broadly talked about state legislative power as being a power to take care of the health, safety and morals of the community. That's what the purpose of the state's legislative power was. Now, were there limits to that power? I think to answer that question you have to go to each state one by one and ask well, what are those limits?
Speaker 2:And a lot of the states have bills of rights or specific limitations on the use of state power state legislative power in their own constitutions. And so if you look at a state constitution like the state of Virginia, for example, or the way that the state of Massachusetts' constitution was written in that era, you would have specific limitations. Government couldn't transgress the right to keep and bear arms or to religious liberty or religious worship, or would have to give due process of law before somebody's charged with a crime. Those kinds of things are often built into state constitutions as well, and so the national constitution has some of those similar provisions, but the way that it operates is different. The presumption at the state level is that the government has broad powers over these things, and at the national level. The presumption is the opposite is that the government only has a discrete set of powers that are granted to it in the Constitution.
Speaker 1:So for the federal Constitution you talked about limited and enumerated powers. Where would a student or somebody who's looking at this kind of find those lists for our federal government?
Speaker 2:There's a way in which I think we often think of power. It's easy to think of power as one thing there's just one thing that we call power, and that's in the government and then we divide it into different branches of government. The reality, I think, for the founders, is that they thought of power as different kinds of power. There's legislative power, there's executive power and there's judicial power, and they're different things, they operate in a different kind of way. And so if you think about what are the limited and enumerated powers of the government, well, for the legislature it's in Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, largely, and you go to that part of the Constitution and there is a list of specific powers that are granted to the legislature. And so before Congress legislates, it has to identify and exercise one of its enumerated powers.
Speaker 2:It's a little bit different when you get to the judiciary. The judiciary says that the judicial power of the United States is vested in a Supreme Court and then in these inferior courts that Congress creates. That's not a specific list of judicial powers, it is the judicial power. And then you get the executive power vested in the President of the United States Again, not a list of specific executive powers, but the executive power vested in the president. So there is this sense, I think, when you look at the national constitution, that the way that power is limited also is relative to the kind of power that's being limited, and it's largely legislative power that is subject to this idea of enumeration in the Constitution.
Speaker 1:Why would the founders be so concerned about legislative power? Because if we're looking at Article I, section 8, like there is a clear list but then there's not for executive and judiciary. Why were they so concerned with that specific branch?
Speaker 2:Pretty two different reasons.
Speaker 2:One is that they came from a system of parliamentary sovereignty and they did not want to repeat that system in the United States, and so there wasn't a sense that anything Congress wanted to do was, by definition, constitutional or with authority.
Speaker 2:So there's a way of wanting to limit the legislative branch. There's also this sense that in a Republican government, a government in which the people rule, that the branch that is most likely to abuse power is the branch that is the most popular or responsive to the people, which is the legislature, and so they go out of their way to try to limit legislative power. But then there's this other reason too, which is the historical coincidence or happenstance, the moment that they find themselves in, where you've got 13 colonies that turned into 13 states that are now trying to think of a general government, and the states were very worried about the national government exercising powers that they wanted to retain for themselves, and so there's an added layer of federalism, the division of power between the states and the national government, that also leads them to want to limit national legislative power.
Speaker 1:Were there any concerns with the founders as they're drafting the Constitution that yes, we want to create a limited government, but we don't want it so limited that we run into a lot of the same problems that we did with the Articles of Confederation?
Speaker 2:That's the whole game, and the reason why they're together is that the Articles of Confederation is so limited that it can't accomplish what the national government needs to accomplish. And so you ask well, what does it need to accomplish? And for them the answer was well, we need a unified foreign policy, we need a national economy, and so we need a national government that can regulate the channels of interstate commerce, and we want to facilitate interstate commerce. And that, largely, is what the powers of the national government ends up being about. You have the ability to raise armies and navies, to declare war, to have a unified foreign policy. You have the ability to regulate commerce among the states and with foreign nations.
Speaker 2:And in those areas where the national government has power, the founders wanted it to be efficient in the exercise of its power and supreme. So the constitution also says that the national government is supreme and that the laws of the United States that are passed by the United States under the Constitution are the supreme law of the land. And so in those areas in which the government does have legitimate enumerated powers, they are supreme in the exercise of those powers. The national government is, and that was, I think, the idea is that there's not a limit to the way that you exercise your legitimate powers, but you're limited only to these specific objectives for the national government.
Speaker 1:Dr Jair. That once again was incredibly efficient, and I think that any student listening to this right now, whether they're a junior high, high school or college student, absolutely understands the difference between limited power, limited government excuse me in the state governments and then the national governments and then even between the three branches. So thank you so much again for your expertise. We really appreciate having you as a guest.
Speaker 2:Well, thanks for having me. Hope that was helpful.
