Good morning. It's Sunday, October the 12th. When the founding fathers declared independence

and embarked on the mission of building a new nation in 1776, they sought to create a form of government

that would be protected from the kind of tyranny they experienced under British rule.

They wanted the colonies, soon to become the states, to be sovereign and able to govern themselves.

They didn't want America to have a centralized government that consolidated all of the power in the

country. So when they drafted the Articles of Confederation, they established a so-called

confed Confederate government.

It vested most of the power to individual state legislatures, and it created a relatively

weak national government that couldn't really do anything other than declare war and sign treaties.

But the states weren't exactly united. Instead, as the Articles of Confederation put it, they had

entered into a, quote,

League of Friendship. That initial form of government didn't really work out. It created an unstable

political environment. It saddled the country with crippling debt that led to a depression.

So in 1787, each state sent delegates to Independence Hall in Philadelphia to reform the government.

We now refer to that meeting, one of the most important gatherings in American history, as the Constitutional Convention.

That convention resulted in the creation of the Constitution of the United States.

The drafters of the Constitution realized that the country needed a new form of government,

built upon the idea that power must be balanced between different levels of government and responsibilities must be shared.

So they preserved the state's ability to govern themselves, but they also established a slightly stronger federal government than what the country previously had, one that could defend the interests of the

nation as a whole and maintain a consistency across the land. That division of power is known as

federalism. That term, federalism doesn't appear a single time in the Constitution, but it is the

core principle of the American government embodied in the Constitution itself. Article 1,

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