Christine Broom
11:00 am
9/28/2012
Susan Boyle

The Articles of Confederation set up a weak government because it gave to much power to the states and not enough power to the central government. Each state was given the power to levy there own commerce. The state governments obtained individual debts during the war. Many larger states ended up having a much larger debt, while the smaller states ended up having a smaller debt. As more people were put in the hands of the larger states with larger populations, the larger states could very easily vote for the assumption of state debt. This made all the states pay for a "single state" debt rather than that state paying off debt alone. Another thing is that the state governments were given more power than the federal governments. The Articles of Confederation had many strengths and weaknesses. There were a lot more weaknesses because it was the "first official government of the United Sates". Some of the main weaknesses were, it has no army to protect from the outside forces, it had no executive branch, it had no federal court system-judicial branch, the government couldn’t force its own laws, it allowed each state to create there own foreign policies. The biggest strength was the ability of this article to bring all the thirteen original states together as one and establish a common legislature. Each of these states was expected to respect the laws of the other states. The constitution had a system called checks and balances. Checks and balances were each branch of government had some sort of control over the other two branches of government. So that none of the three branches would become to powerful. An example of this system would be for instance the executive branch can veto bills from the legislative branch but the legislative can override the veto. Another example would be that in the executive branch