American political institutions (2): how the constitution was written
This autumn, I am doing a six week (five session) evening class at London’s City Lit on the subject of “American Political Institutions” and our lecturer is Malcolm Malcolmson. The second of our lectures looked at how the US Constitution had come about and why it distributes power as it does.
Following the American War of Independence with Britain, the Constitutional Convention of 1787 in Philadelphia wanted to create a political system that was in total contrast to the concentration of power in the hands of a monarch like King George III.
At the time of the debates around a new constitution, the ‘Virginia plan’ (representation by population) versus the ‘New Jersey’ plan (equal representation for each state) gave rise to ‘The Great Compromise’. So the constitution was designed to share power between the 13 founding states but in a manner which did not give excessive influence to the small number of larger states in population terms (New York, Massachusetts and Virginia). This is why the seats in House of Representatives are allocated in population terms but the Senate has two members per state regardless of the population of that state.
The constitution also ensured that power was spread between the three arms of government – the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary – so that no one arm could dominate and each arm exercises ‘checks and balances’ in respect of the other two. In order further to ensure that volatile public opinion could not result in rapid changes, members of the House of Representatives serve for two years, the President serves for four years, and members of the Senate serve for six years.
Originally the legislature was intended to be more powerful than it is now, but the presidency has acquired more power over time (especially when Lincioln was in power during the American Civil War) and the Supreme Court has become more influential as such an old constitution has to be interpreted for modern times and as the legislature and the presidency have been in conflict.
It could be argued that the ‘founding fathers’ were very far-sighted in their drafting of the constitution because the original constitution managed to accommodate the expansion of the USA from the original 13 states to the present 50 and because the same constitution remains in force some 240 years later.
On the other hand, it could be argued that the US Constitution is exceptionally hard to amend and has ossified a structure that may have been appropriate to an emerging nation two and half centuries ago but no longer reflects the reality that America is now a global power in a globalised world. Furthermore, in the hands of highly partisan parties such as at present, Congress can be reduced to legislative and financial grid-lock.