Blog 5, Principles and Shaping Society

10/1 - Of the 8 principles of the Constitution; which do you believe to be most influential in shaping society? What role have these ideas had on domestic and foreign policies? 

        I had a hard time choosing one, but I decided to  choose Popular Sovereignty. Popular Sovereignty is the principle that the legitimacy of the state is created and sustained by the will or consent of its people, who are the source of all political power. It can also be called "the voice of the people." I do believe it to be the most influential. The people are pretty much able to decide how we want the government. We can change and add things as we please. This has shaped our society more than anything because we, the people,  control it. We do things to benefit us, and seldom do something against the peoples best interest.
         Popular Sovereignty has a big role in the US domestic policy because it affects the people. How we choose our president has a lot to do with what domestic policies he/she is for. Some hot policies for the 2012 election are abortion rights, the rights of homosexuals, and the role of religion in public life. Depending on the person they will side with one candidate or the other. Of course most of the time the Democrats side with the Democrat and same with Republicans. It has been greatly known in our elections to take each candidates weak points or topics people are not sure about and use it against them to make themselves seem better. Which is not always a good thing. For example Romney saying "Look Obama wants this and I will do the better thing." He kind of misleads the people to agree with himself.
           I am not sure real sure about popular sovereignty playing a role in foreign policy. We choose our government representatives and they handle matters over seas. We the people really don't control foreign policy ourselves. Although I see we could control it since we are in a war right now and also pushing for more countries to adopt our government style. This may be another deciding factor in who wins the election in 2012. I believe Romney wants to push our ways more down the throat of other countries and Obama is trying to slowly push our ways onto them but compromising with them as he goes along and not trying to dictate what they do as I believe Romney would. Depending on who is elected this year, we will soon find out what kind of effect popular sovereignty will have on our foreign policies.