Problems with the Constitution?

Dear Ted and Jody:

While the day started out 3 degrees F warmer than yesterday did, it is only going to get to 70% of yesterday’s high, around 70 F. Even Juli who loves heat, is welcoming the cooler temperatures. Speaking of Juli, her husband’s progresses on what I am now going to call the outdoor pizza gazebo. I am calling it that as they have ordered a pizza oven for it. He is virtually putting this together by himself.

I have been reflecting on what the past century’s curriculum in Political Science missed in its treatment of the history and practice of American Government: largely a critical look at what the Constitution seemed to have missed or inadvertently created. While not addressed in the Constitution itself, at the time Article I was drafted, it was the norm for former colonial legislatures to be composed of single member districts, as was Parliament in England. Since that tradition has been followed, this practice has mandated a two party electoral system which developed very quickly. Why? Simply because to have an impact on policy a group of legislators has to be a majority. This means that third party candidates, must align with one of the two major parties to have any hope of influence on policy or even gain committee assignments in either house of Congress. Thus people like Senators Sanders and King are anomalies and might as well be Democrats rather than the Socialist and Independent which they respectively are.

Another thing the founders failed to take into account is Justices on the Supreme Court who are supported by a sizable minority in the Senate would not be impeachable for bad behavior such as, taking expensive gifts, as long as the Justices were handing down decisions the sizable minority in the Senate favored: e.g., Dobbs. Impeachment would not be brought if the majority in the House also approved on the decisions those justices handed down.

As a side note, the danger of factions as discussed in The Federalist No. 10 need to be reexamined as for solutions.

The Connecticut compromise which gave states equal representation in the Senate adhered to the idea that the 13 original states (former colonies) were each independent national entities (as stated in the Treaty of Paris which so recognized the former colonies). This compromise was fine for independent states, but a nightmare for the subsequent “united” nation they melted into with 50 states rather than the original baker’s dozen. The Treaty of Paris, granted the United States all land north of Florida, East of the Mississippi, south of the Canadian border, and roughly west of the states of Pennsylvania, Virginia, the Carolinas and Georgia: The Northwest Territory. The Northwest Ordinance was passed by the Congress under the Articles in July of 1787, while the convention “to amend the Articles of Confederation” which we call the Constitutional Convention today, was underway. So, the founders knew they had some territory from which new states could be carved out. This equal representation of states in the Senate was beginning to represent places that never had any claim to being a nation state. The undemocratic nature, unequal representation, of the Senate became more and more serious as the nation expanded westward.

I think I am only scratching the surface of constitutional issues that we should have been addressing over the past 235 years, not to mention in Political Science courses for the past century or so.

Love, Ed