The Pennsylvania and Virginia delegates then met frequently during the days leading up to May Together these men would forge a radical new plan, the Virginia Plan, which would shape the course of events during that summer of By seizing the initiative, this small group of nationalist-minded politicians was able to set the terms of debate during the initial stages of the Convention—gearing the discussion toward not whether , but how —a vastly strengthened continental government would be constructed.
On May 28, , the state delegations unanimously agreed to a proposal that would prove invaluable in allowing men like Madison, Wilson, and Morris to move their plan forward. But the rule of secrecy gave to delegates the freedom to disagree, sometimes vehemently, on important issues, and to do so without the posturing and pandering to public opinion that so often marks political debate today. And it also gave delegates the freedom to change their minds; on many occasion, after an evening of convivial entertainment with one another, the delegates would return the following morning or even the following week or month, and find ways to reach agreement on issues that had previously divided them.
The rule of secrecy helped make the Constitutional Convention a civil and deliberative body, rather than a partisan one. It helped make compromise an attribute of statesmanship rather than a sign of weakness. It also became immediately clear that, however bold and innovative the plan may have been, there were many delegates in the room who had grave misgivings about some aspects of it. For nearly four months, the delegates attempted to work through, and resolve, their disagreements.
The most divisive of those issues—those involving the apportionment of representation in the national legislature, the powers and mode of election of the chief executive, and the place of the institution of slavery in the new continental body politic—would change in fundamental ways the shape of the document that would eventually emerge on September 17, The delegates haggled over how to apportion representation in the legislature off and on for more than six weeks between May 30 and July Those from large, populous states such as Virginia and Pennsylvania—supporters of the Virginia Plan—argued that representation in both houses of the proposed new congress should be based on population, while those from smaller states such as New Jersey and Delaware—supporters of the New Jersey Plan—argued for equal representation for each state.
The compromise that eventually emerged, one championed most energetically by the delegates from Connecticut, was obvious: representation in the House of Representatives would be apportioned according to population, with each state receiving equal representation in the Senate.
In the final vote on the so-called Connecticut Compromise on July 16, five states supported the proposal; four opposed, including Virginia and Pennsylvania; and one state—Massachusetts—was divided. James Madison and many of his nationalist colleagues were disconsolate, convinced that the compromise would destroy the very character of the national government they hoped to create.
In The Federalist No. In this, as in so many areas, the so-called original meaning of the Constitution was not at all self-evident— even to the Framers of the Constitution themselves. Board of Education jurisprudence.
Constitution is the world's hardest to amend, according to Levinson. Yugoslavia used to hold that distinction; perhaps not coincidentally, Yugoslavia no longer exists. Surprisingly, considering their reverence of the Founders, conservatives have led the way in reimagining the Constitution, so they can add an amendment to create a right to life after Roe v.
Wade or to rein in the federal government with a balanced-budget amendment. But a full-on constitutional convention goes too far, says Dranias, and would inevitably descend into chaos just imagine dealing with abortion, for instance, or gun rights. DeMoss, a senior judge on the U. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit—advocate a convention to propose amendments to the Constitution, as laid out in Article V, as opposed to starting from scratch.
He wants a balanced-budget amendment; Lessig wants campaign finance reform; someone else might want to change the Senate. The states can call a convention to propose amendments if three-fourths 38 are in favor. Congress would still need to approve the changes, but the process puts the states, and not Washington, in charge.
They join a long line of fellow travelers from Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen, who called for a second constitutional convention throughout his long political career, to William Safire, who wrote in that he wanted to "be a delegate to the next Constitutional Convention Con Con II.
If Americans managed to convoke a constitutional convention, they could draw on hundreds of possible tweaks with text already written, available online thanks to the Google-funded Comparative Constitutions Project. After hundreds of tries, we humans have gotten so good at chartering governments that we've developed a set of best practices. Our Constitution violates many of them. It comes complete with sample language "The capital city of [State] is [Capital City]" , instructions on how to write a preamble, and a veritable choose-your-own adventure story of democratic forms of governance: Would you like to be a federal state, where power flows from the regions to the capital, or a unity state, where all power derives from the seat of government?
Religious or secular? Democracy is available off the shelf. As we've learned what works and what doesn't, constitutions have started to look and more alike. Not surprisingly, the U.
Djibouti has the most. American exceptionalism is a fine thing, but there are still things we can learn from other places. Take elections, the most basic function of any democracy. We've been doing them the same way since the Progressive era, but instant-runoff voting has become increasingly popular because it allows voters to rank multiple choices instead of picking just one.
Australia, India, Ireland, and dozens of other countries have adopted it, as has San Francisco and the Academy Awards. IRV, as it's known, would make room for new parties by allowing people to vote for a third-party candidate first without "wasting" it, and then for a mainstream candidate second. This change would force politicians to compete for everyone's votes, because they would need non-first-choice votes too. Alternately, we could also eliminate party primaries, as California did recently, and replace them with a nonpartisan runoff between the top two vote-getters.
These innovations would help reduce one-party monopoly and avoid the radicalizing effects of partisan primaries. Other thinkers are even further out on the cutting-edge of democracy. Germany's Pirate Party advocates something called "liquid democracy. The process is a bit complicated, but essentially citizens can participate directly, say, by proposing legislation. They can also delegate their vote to a proxy they trust, who can then in turn delegate her vote and the original vote to a third proxy, and so on down the line until you get something that resembles a legislature.
For techno-evangelists, this is the future. Justice must include both procedural fairness in government proceedings and fair outcomes. There is one key value not mentioned in the preamble: equality. This omission should not be surprising for a Constitution that protected and institutionalized slavery and that protected only the rights of white men. Women, of course, were not accorded the right to vote until the adoption of the 19th Amendment in The 14th Amendment, adopted in , after the Civil War, added the assurance of equal protection.
I believe these are the core values of the Constitution: democratic governance, effective government, justice, liberty and equality. The Constitution was intentionally written in broad, open-textured language. It leaves it to each generation to give meaning to these words.
It is and was meant to be a living document. There is no other way that it could have survived the test of time. It was written in for an agrarian slave society and is used to govern our digital world of the 21st century. The Constitution also has stood the test of time because of its core values.
It protects democratic governance, ensuring regular elections of those who hold most key offices. It creates a structure of government that provides checks and balances, such as the separation of powers at the federal level and the division of powers between the federal government and the states. It seeks justice, such as ensuring that no person is deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law.
It safeguards liberty and, especially in the Bill of Rights, protects fundamental rights such as freedom of speech and the press, religious freedom, trial by jury in criminal and civil cases and protection from cruel and unusual punishment.
It promises equal protection of the law. Many constitutional provisions did this. Article 1, Section 9, prohibits Congress from banning the importation of slaves until , and Article 5 prohibited this from being amended.
Article 1, Section 2, provides that, for purposes of representation in Congress, enslaved black people in a state would be counted as three-fifths of the number of white inhabitants of that state. The northern states had already begun to abolish slavery at the time of the Constitutional Convention, but the southern states were growing more dependent on slave labor. At the convention, southern delegates insisted that the Constitution not interfere with slavery. Northerners agreed, both because they considered slavery a state matter, and because they felt that the southern states would never enter the Union without such a guarantee.
The Constitution prohibited Congress from ending the importation of slaves before It also provided that slaves be counted as three-fifths of a person to determine taxation and representation in Congress. At the time, slaves accounted for about 20 percent of the U. During the ratification of the Constitution, the most inflammatory issue was not its toleration of slavery but its lack of a bill of rights. Thomas Jefferson, who had drafted the Declaration of Independence, was away serving as the American minister to France.
In order to win ratification, the authors of the Constitution needed to explain and defend their handiwork to the people. These essays have been reprinted in book form in many editions since then, and are known today as The Federalist.
In one of his essays, Madison discussed the failure of past republics when one faction grew so strong that it dominated and suppressed all others. Madison predicted that the American republic would survive because of its size and its continued growth. In a large republic, no single faction would predominate, he reasoned.
This would prevent a powerful majority from suppressing the rights of the minority. As Americans moved westward into new territories, they would form new states that would join the Union and add even more groups into the equation.
The arguments put forth by the authors of The Federalist carried great weight, and they still inform us about the thinking of the framers of the Constitution. On December 7, , Delaware became the first state to ratify the Constitution, and other states quickly followed. The fiercest battles took place in the larger states. To gain support, Madison pledged that the new government would move speedily to adopt a bill of rights.
On June 25, , after four months of debate, the Virginia convention voted 89 to 79 for ratification. On July 26, New York concluded an equally divisive debate and approved the Constitution by the narrow margin of 30 to Still, eleven of the thirteen states had ratified the Constitution, which was two more than required. North Carolina eventually joined the Union in , and Rhode Island in Among its last acts, the outgoing Confederation Congress set the first Wednesday in January of as the date for the first Presidential election.
The Electoral College would cast its ballots on the first Wednesday in February, and the new government would begin on the first Wednesday in March. But on March 4, , neither the House nor the Senate could establish a quorum. Both had to wait until April, when enough members arrived to conduct the business of implementing the new Constitution. Many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention were elected as members of the First Congress, including James Madison, who served in the House of Representatives.
Representative Madison, true to his word, introduced a bill of rights. Congress crafted his proposals into twelve amendments. The states ratified ten of them, which became known as the Bill of Rights. Two hundred years later, in , the states ratified the eleventh of these original amendments, which dealt with congressional pay increases.
The unratified twelfth amendment would have set the number of people to be represented in each congressional district at fifty thousand, a number so low that the House of Representatives would by now have grown to many thousands of members. Presidents vastly expanded their power in competition with Congress. The Supreme Court became the final arbiter of whether acts of Congress or Presidential actions were constitutional.
Beginning with the case of Marbury v. Madison , the Supreme Court asserted its right to declare laws unconstitutional—a power that is implied but not specified in the Constitution. In the case of McCulloch v. The brevity of the document suggested that its authors expected judges to interpret its meaning, and anticipated flexibility in its implementation.
Growing from thirteen to fifty states, the United States spread from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean, with a larger population, a more complex economy, and a mightier military than the authors of the Constitution could possibly have imagined. Yet the Constitution remains essentially the same document they drafted during the summer of At the time that the Constitution was written, people worried that past republics had worked best in small governments such as city-states.
James Madison saw different possibilities and argued in The Federalist that the American republic would grow stronger as it expanded because it would be harder for any one group to dominate it.
0コメント