CHAPTER TWo • FoRGiNG A NEW GovERNmENT: THE CoNsTiTuTioN 41
consisting of personal secretaries and a few others. Four small departments reported to
President Washington. Today, because Congress delegates specific tasks to the president
and to the executive branch, the national executive has grown to include hundreds of
departments, agencies, and organizations that employ about 2.7 million civilians.
Changes in ways of doing political business have also led to reinterpretation of the
Constitution. The Constitution does not mention political parties, yet these informal,
“extraconstitutional” organizations make the nominations for offices, run the campaigns,
organize the members of Congress, and in fact change the election system from time
to time. In many ways, the Constitution has been adapted from a document serving the
needs of a small, rural republic to one that provides a framework of government for an
industrial giant with vast geographic, natural, and human resources.The supreme Court justices as of 2013. On the top, left to right, are Sonia
Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, Samuel Alito Jr., and Elena Kagan. On the bottom, left to right, are Clarence
Thomas, Antonin Scalia, Chief Justice John Roberts, Anthony M. Kennedy, and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. How
does the Court exercise judicial review? (Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)Copyright 2014 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.