The United States,
as an authority graph.
The people. Distinct powers. Conditional checks.
Follow the source of a power, then see what bounds its exercise.
Scope & coverage
Explore the constitutional order
Who governs here?
Who gets a voice?
D.C. residents elect local leaders and participate in presidential elections, but have no voting representation in Congress. Follow the distinction between selecting an officeholder and supplying the office’s powers.
A source is not a sovereign.
A check is not an ancestor.
The Constitution is an instrument recording constituting and amending acts. In this model, the people are accepted ground holders. The engine does not prove that starting frame legitimate.
Derivation traces the source of a power. Precedence resolves a collision between valid effects. Federal supremacy does not make every state power a federal delegation.
Who may do what,
under which conditions?
Permission needs
a surviving path.
Try one constitutional rule. These examples isolate a scope or composition check; they assume valid occupancy and all unstated requirements.
A real decision needs the relevant law, facts, timing and determinations. These fixtures cannot authorize an actual government action.
AUTHORIZED: a valid path in this fixture.
DENIED: decidable failure. INDETERMINATE: deny and escalate.
The backbone is mapped.
The legal universe is larger.
This edition covers constitutional institutions and major powers, limits, duties and occupancy rules. It uses the Constitution as amended, rather than treating the original 1787 text as current throughout.
Federal branches; popular and state roles; major Article I powers; appointments; elections; impeachment; rights; judicial review; amendments; federal supremacy.
Fifty state legal orders, local governments, departments, lower courts, tribal nations and territories. D.C. has a focused Council/home-rule path; its other institutions and full legal history remain unexpanded.
A live incumbent roster, agency-level statutes and regulations, a case-law corpus, exhaustive constitutional doctrine, or actual bitemporal position histories.
Judicial review and incorporation are labeled interpretive. Unknown scope, unresolved conflicts and missing source-specific paths must not silently become permission.
Parties, lobbying, money and informal influence are not encoded as authority. No factual CONTROL dataset has been asserted here.
Read the source,
not just the connection.
Reviewed 7 October 2026. Each record includes an article, amendment, or source-specific locator. Classification into the architecture’s primitives is a modeling choice.