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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Nadine Carroll who wrote (120044)	11/20/2003 9:36:56 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 281500

Well Jacob, you're just going to have to suffer with the fact that the United States of America is not a pure democracy; it is a republic with representative government. Our Founders had many (justifiable) worries about democracy; the original system was even less democratic than the current one. That much is certainly true. Not least being items like the 3/5 compromise (the "Federal ratio") that gave the South an outsized voice in Congress, and a distinct advantage in early Presidential races, and the de facto acceptance of slavery, however grudging that was on the part of a few people like Hamilton, Morris, Franklin and a couple of other northerners at the Convention. But when you go around dissing our elections because the electoral college is undemocratic, then your beef is with the US Constitution....But the electoral college is not one of my beefs. It is just one of the various ways the Constitution tries to ensure that big states can't run roughshod over small ones, like the formula that gives both Rhode Island and California two Senators. That part isn't true. The electoral college was one of the several anti-democratic provisions in the Constitution. It had nothing to do with ensuring "that big states can't run roughshod over small ones" (though the provision allotting two Senators to each state did), it had everything to do with the fact that most of the elites at the Constitutional Convention didn't trust most people to have the wisdom elect a decent President (or, for that matter, Senators either--I'm sure you recall that Senators were originally elected by State Legislatures, not by direct election, and this was so right into the 20th century). Common people were considered far too prone to vote according to their baser, short term interests, or too prone to be deceived by demagogues, and too foolish and uneducated to make a proper choice, to see real long term interests. If we were to truly adopt a strict constructivist view of the constitution in accordance with how the writers intended it, electors would be elected to the Electoral College without firm instructions on who to vote for for President, and would not even be aligned with parties--they would be elected to exercise their independent judgement as to whom would be the best candidate at the time for President and would vote for them. The original "Great Compromise" which gave rise to the odd fact that today half a million or so people in the small states (it was about 20,000 I think in Rhode Island at the time) get the same 2 votes in the Senate as the 20 something million in more populous states (it was about 500,000 or so freemen in VA, with another 250,000 slaves) was not something that either came easily or that people like Madison, Randolph and others liked. In fact, it was fought over even more strenuously than slavery was, which says something about the priorities of most of the people at the Convention. Madison thought it was a terrible idea, and not just because he resided in one of the large states at the time. He was one of the few people there who was genuinely trying to construct a "good" government, not just one that would be acceptable to the vested interests of the time. Contrary to those who idealize the Constitution today, neither he nor Hamilton thought that the final result was very good, though they both fought for its adoption, both with the writing of the Federalist Papers and in their respective state ratifying conventions. They did think it was better than the Articles was, though, and "workable" precisely because it was vague enough that they could interpret various provisions in it (especially with the "necessary and proper" and "supremacy" clauses) in ways that would allow them to do what they thought needed to be done. Of course, conservatives today lambast the effects of those clauses when they are used to do things they don't like, and love to pretend that precise "original meanings" can be seen in the document that seredipitously support their POV. I don't think that Madison or Hamilton would have been either surprised or happy to see how contemporary so-called conservatives treat the Constitution. They are far from the vision of government as honest broker between competing interests that both of those guys shared, whatever their other quite large differences were.