Political Science: The 1787 Constitution and the Government of the Elite - Term Paper Example

The 1787 Constitution and the Government of the Elite In 1787, the first American Constitution was drafted and that this development represented an American revolution of remarkable importance. Here, the United States was made into one single unit with the government at its center, exercising fiscal, military, judicial and regulatory powers previously denied to the Confederation. The principal beneficiary of this Constitution was the new American central government as it acquired far-reaching powers out from scratch. The new Constitution was primarily concerned with the objective of creating power where there had been none – for the central government and the elite that created it - and not about limiting the power of government, as it is so often represented. The new government as mandated by the Constitution could impose its own taxes, raise an army, regulate interstate and foreign commerce, and make use of the federal courts to enforce treaties and other laws. (thesis paragraph) (Government Elite) The strong centralized system of government - including the manner in which its most powerful policymaking offices are elected – the US Senate, President of the United States and the judges of the courts - mandated by the first American Constitution demonstrated the theory of the Government Elite. This theory holds that society is ruled by the few not entirely to further their self-interest but that it stems from the rationale that decisions via the popular majority could be fickle and hurt the stability of the country. Indeed, even though voters could elect their leaders, they must still choose among competing elites in their cohesive class. The Elite theory is represented by, first, the Electoral College, wherein votes for the President are given to electors whose wisdom are considered better than the majority. A President may be elected even though he lost in the popular vote. All he needed to do was win the favor of the electors in this electoral body. Then, there’s the case of the United States Senate, which obviously was fashioned after the upper house of the English Parliament, known as the House of Lords. Senators are selected indirectly – through the choices of each of state legislatures – and that this was designed to serve as some form of filtration process In the past, the elite theory was considered to be a good idea. No less than the framers of the Constitution believed in the principle. Alexander Hamilton, for instance, emphasized that: All communities divide themselves into the few and the many. The first are the rich and the wellborn, the other the mass of the people… The people are turbulent and changing; they seldom judge or determine right. Give therefore to the first class a distinct, permanent share in the government. They will check the unsteadiness of the second, and as they cannot receive any advantage by a change, they therefore will ever maintain good government. (cited in Korten 2007, p. 184) Indeed, some of the characteristics of the new government include the fact that it does not govern individual citizens and that it does not deal with the fundamental political problems of the population. Specifically, the Constitution strengthened the judiciary and most importantly created the executive department. The executive branch under a president with a four-year term and no requirement for rotation in office supposedly gave the new government energy missing in the past charter of the Confederation. Many scholars believe that this sense was crucial in gaining acceptance of broad federal authority and a stronger executive. (Fact #1) The 1787 Constitution was the American revolutionaries’ second attempt at establishing a workable system of government among the original 13 colonies after their war for independence with Great Britain. The outcome – the federal form of government - differed significantly from the Articles of Confederation that emerged in the previous 11 years of struggle for a unified America after the declaration on independence in 1776. The first government, which became possible after the ratification of the Articles of Confederation, was a confederate government - a system in which the national government requested money and troops from states that alone had the power to operate on individual citizens. History would tell us that during the 11 years covering this period numerous problems emerged including local insurrections, Indian revolt, the slave trade, among others. These factors collectively sped up the drafting of a charter that would create a central government for the United States. The Preamble of the Constitution auspiciously stated that the charter was established in order to, among other things, promote general Welfare. It was, hence, meant to be a tool in order to address the problems that plague the country after the declaration of Independence by erecting a working central government authority. (Fact #7) The federalist character of the new system of government – one involving a division of power between the national government and various subgovernments – ideally catered to the diverse identities held by the states. The states retained state boundaries and autonomies that allowed for the adaptation to local needs. However, the emergence of the new central government appeared to be reflective of the American history as a colony to Britain. The federal government – with its new range of powers - in some way resembled the British authority exercised towards the colonies, which in this case were the states. (Fact #2) The 55 framers on the new Constitution were best represented by James Madison. He was the most characteristic of the dominant mode of thought during the drafting of the Constitution because he was very influential. Madison was mostly interested with the relationship between economic and political institutions and the expansion of power of the central government. One of the apparent principles that he espoused – supported by majority of the Federalists – was the preference for enhanced executive power and that this betrayed their preference for the monarchy – only that in their version, power resides in the executive branch instead of the monarch. On another front, most of the Founding Fathers were also receptive of the ideas espoused by the French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu. The philosopher’s believed that the best form of government was aristocratic republic – a fact that suited the landed gentry that constituted the Philadelphia convention. Montesquieu did not believe that the common people were capable of making wise policies. (Taylor 2006, p. 160) This would reflect in the kind of elitist government that the 1787 Constitution would create. (Fact #3) First off, the Constitution adopted a form of representative democracy, which is based on elections. The House of Representatives was to be elected every two years. It was argued that the term is short enough for the Congressmen to secure proper dependence on their electors. There was a supposed fear of long Parliaments, which, on the basis of the British experience, were seen as the hallmark of tyranny. However, the United States Senate and the US President became the opposite of this very ideal. The charter originally prescribed an indirect mode of selection in the case of the members of the United States Senate; the President of the United States; and the case of the judges of the United States courts. The national terms of office are staggered (Fact #5). The Constitution allowed senators to be chosen by state legislatures. In combination with the indirect elections which the Constitution mandated for the American Congress and the election of the President via the Electoral College, the American Senate was effectively buffered from the popular mood and therefore, control. In addition, (Fact #4) the single-member plurality election definitely proved to work against the development of minor parties in America. This system converts seats into votes in a way that damages the interests of small parties. And so, existing or would-be parties are forced to join a major American party because it has to struggle on its own with very little hope of representation. This also would result in minorities receiving much smaller share of seats that they would under a system of proportional representation. Minority votes do not effectively translate into a proportionate share of seats unless geographical concentration allows minorities to dominate across various American regions. (Fact #6) The strong executive branch undermine the concept of the separation of powers and the principle of checks and balances between the three supposed equal branches of the central government and the between the central and state governments. The foundation of the three co-equal branches of the government was supposedly to provide for the principle of separation of powers and the checks and balances of these institutions of the government and between the federal government and the states. In explaining this principle, Madison himself stated that “the defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituents, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.” (cited in Vile 2005, p. 84) The “separation of powers principle” also characterized the federal form of government, along with the authority of the general government and the subgovernments to act directly on individual citizens. Furthermore, the Constitution established the respective powers of these governments to help establish the respective powers of these governments and the boundaries between them. However, the expansion of the executive powers weakened the popular control of the legislature – the only possible institution that could check executive usurpation of further powers. Here, a tyrannically inclined President could exploit the weakness of the American legislature and perpetuate his power out of the ambiguous and clearly favorable provisions of the Constitution. From the perspective of the modern times, the original Constitution was unequal and unjust to a remarkable degree. (Fact #9) For instance, the issue about slavery was so controversial that it was tacitly stipulated in four provisions for it to be allowed to continue for the next 20 years. In addition, slaves – referred to as “other persons” – were considered three-fifths of a person in the calculation for a state’s official population tally for government representation and federal taxation. (Canon 2008, p. 7) Although condemning slavery as a violation of natural rights, the framers considered inequality of wealth a sign of the health of the regime, and so it consented to slavery for 20 years. It was silent on its abolition and that this emphasized two things: first, slavery was a way of life, an accepted practice, hence, was state sanctioned; second, citizens owed their allegiance to the states first underscoring the link to the slave-holding states who wanted autonomy so bad just so their investment to human capital would not be jeopardized. In the declaration of independence, the self-evident truth was stated that all men are created equal and that no government could make men less or more equal than the laws of nature and of nature’s God had made them. The 1787 Constitution failed when the primary objective of such charter was to establish a government based on the consent of the governed and on equality – one that secures life, liberty and property. However, the elitist nature of the 1787 Constitution made greater equality among whites on the same plane as freedom and property. (Fact #10) If one reads the original text of the 1787 Constitution, there were no property qualifications stipulated in the 1787 Constitutions either to vote or be elected to office but the framers of the Constitution did intend to include a property qualifications for representatives but could not achieve it. Therefore, the absence of this requirement in the charter was not a matter of principle but of expediency. What supported this assumption was the constitutional stipulation about the eligibility to vote: here, eligibility for voting in the federal elections were mandated to be the same as those required by the states for their lower houses. It must be noted that during the period, almost all American states required property-holding qualifications for voting. (Fact #11) Finally, there was also the absence of personal protections – the Bill of Rights -and that it did not for a decisive factor in determining the authority of the proposed government. The only hint of protection for “fundamental rights” appeared in a vague reference to the other rights “retained by the people.” The government structure that the Constitution promulgated left most of the rights to the jurisdiction of state government. During the debates in the Philadelphia Convention, opposing factions were labeled as Federalists and anti-Federalists. Anti-Federalists stressed that the 1787 Constitution created a strong national government that seriously threatened the sovereignty of the individual states of the Union and most importantly, the liberty of the people. Indeed, few liberties were safeguarded. Madison argued that the Constitution would never have been ratified if the people believed that all unstated liberties were totally under the control of the federal government. (cited in Siegan 2001, p. 67) The Federalists saw no need for a stipulation of the Bill of Rights because: 1) the separation of and the limitation on federal powers made it unnecessary; 2) constitutional checks and balances would ensure the adherence to the Constitutional provisions; and 3) it was not possible to enumerate all of the people’s rights, and that those that could be left out might be jeopardized. One of the framers of the Constitution, James Wilson, a Pennsylvania delegate, stressed this further by saying that “Everything which is not given, is reserved… It would have been superfluous and absurd, to have stipulated with a federal body of our own creation, that we should not enjoy those privileges, of which we are not divested either by intention or the act that ha brought that body into existence.” (cited in Gutzman 2007, p. 32) There are other criticisms to the 1787 Constitutions well within the scope of justice, equality and freedom. Although, the framers of the Constitution, themselves, recognized the need for changes and have sufficiently outlined specific ways to go about its amendments. However, they made it quite difficult. (Fact #8) The restrictions were so strict because Article V of the Constitution required large supermajorities – two-thirds of both houses of Congress – to propose an amendment and three-fourths of the states to ratify it. A number of the provisions, particularly those concerning slavery, equality, and personal liberty, would not endure. The 1787 Constitution would later undergo twenty-seven successful amendments. The Bill of Rights claimed the first ten of these, underscoring the danger that the original Constitution posed to personal liberties and the danger for the government to usurp further powers over the citizenry. All of the ten were ratified in 1791 while the rest of the seventeen were introduced and approved over the next two centuries. However, the strength of the executive branch, the practice of indirect mode of Congressional selection, continues to this day. Conclusion There are enough evidences from the texts of the 1787 that emphasized the elitist origin of the charter. Certainly, most of the Republican participants of the convention believed that the American problems were brought about by the democratic excesses of the states. And so, by drafting the 1787 Constitution they wanted to create an antidote to such problems. This was accomplished by creating a government that was powerful enough to counter the force of popular will. It is easier to understand and determine the antidemocratic tendencies of the framers of the Constitution when their actions during the drafting of the Constitution in the Philadelphia Convention was triggered by the prevailing republican political idea during the eighteenth century. This idea is anchored on the premise that most stable governments were those which mixed and balanced the interests of society. The only fault is that, after the Constitution was ratified, the scale was tipped in the elite’s favor. The framers of the Constitution had many differences in their political views but that they share one characteristics, which perhaps made all the differences secondary: the founding fathers were white, propertied men. The Constitution that they drafted and ratified absolutely protected their economic and political interests through the creation of governmental structures that diminish the capacity of the sector who might threaten their status and welfare. Bibliography Canon, David. The Enduring Debate: Classic and Contemporary Readings in American Politics. 5th ed. W.W. Norton & Company, 2008. Gutzman, Kevin. The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Constitution. Regnery Publishing, 2007. Korten, David. The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2007. Siegan, Bernard. Property rights: from Magna Carta to the Fourteenth Amendment. Transaction Publishers, 2001. Taylor, Jeff. Where did the party go?: William Jennings Bryan, Hubert Humphrey, and the Jeffersonian legacy. University of Missouri Press, 2006. Vile, John. The Constitutional Convention of 1787: a comprehensive encyclopedia of Americas founding, Volume 2. ABC-CLIO, 2005. Read More