I was always pretty good at social studies/ government/ civics, etc., but the one thing that ALWAYS tripped me up was when we would talk about the three branches of government and it would ask, “Which branch of the government carries out the law?"
If you asked me to describe the functions of the three branches of government, I could do it in detail (legislative makes laws, judicial interprets and evaluates laws, executive enforces/ can veto laws), but I had no idea (and still kind of don’t) what the phrase "carry out” means in terms of government. Every time I got that question on a quiz, I would just try to blindly guess at whether the meaning of “carry out” is closer to making, evaluating, or enforcing law, and I still had to google it right now to find out what it means.
In my mind, if you ask me to define the phrase “carry out,” other than physically putting laws in a bag and taking them somewhere, I would say, “do the thing as planned.” Like, if someone said, “Carry out the protocols we discussed” in a spy movie, I know they’d mean, “Do the thing we talked about.” IDEALLY all three branches of government would be doing SOMETHING. Or if you interpret it to mean ‘finishing,“ there’s very little "finishing” anything involved in government– our government/ civics/ social studies classes would say that our government system is a living and breathing process based on a living document.
And who really 'finishes’ a law? Thanks to the process of checks and balances, it can be any of the three branches. If I didn’t overthink so much, I could be like, “Carries out means finishes, President signs bill into law at the end of the process, that means the Executive Branch carries out law.” That’s probably what they expected us to think. But me being me, I’m always like, “Well, the Supreme Court can rule that a law is unconstitutional, and the Legislative Branch can override a veto, so the President doesn’t really get the last word unless the other two branches agree, so none of these make sense to me.
"I wish there was some way for me to explain as a kid, "I really understand the subject matter, I just can’t wrap my head around this vague verb!” Anyone else have a relatively easy question or topic that you just ALWAYS overthink and screw up?
somethingsupwithdrac