Tag: purpose

Section 3

The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, chosen by the Legislature thereof for six Years; and each Senator shall have one Vote.

Immediately after they shall be assembled in Consequence of the first Election, they shall be divided as equally as may be into three Classes. The Seats of the Senators of the first Class shall be vacated at the Expiration of the second Year, of the second Class at the Expiration of the fourth Year, and of the third Class at the Expiration of the sixth Year, so that one third may be chosen every second Year; and if Vacancies happen by Resignation, or otherwise, during the Recess of the Legislature of any State, the Executive thereof may make temporary Appointments until the next Meeting of the Legislature, which shall then fill such Vacancies.

No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.

The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.

The Senate shall chuse,(sic) their other Officers, and also a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the United States.

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present.

Judgment in Cases of Impeachment shall not extend further than to removal from Office, and disqualification to hold and enjoy any Office of honor, Trust or Profit under the United States: but the Party convicted shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law.

The framers of the Constitution created the United States Senate to protect the rights of individual states and safeguard minority opinion in a system of government designed to give greater power to the national government. They modeled the Senate on governors’ councils of the colonial era and on the state senates that had evolved since independence. The framers intended the Senate to be an independent body of responsible citizens who would share power with the president and the House of Representatives. James Madison, paraphrasing Edmund Randolph, explained in his notes that the Senate’s role was “first to protect the people against their rulers [and] secondly to protect the people against the transient impressions into which they themselves might be led.” (SOURCE:https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Origins_Development.htm)

To balance power between the large and small states, the Constitution’s framers agreed that states would be represented equally in the Senate and in proportion to their populations in the House. Further preserving the authority of individual states, they provided that state legislatures would elect senators. To guarantee senators’ independence from short-term political pressures, the framers designed a six-year Senate term, three times as long as that of popularly elected members of the House of Representatives. Madison reasoned that longer terms would provide stability. “If it not be a firm body,” he concluded, “the other branch being more numerous, and coming immediately from the people, will overwhelm it.”

The Senate was invented, in part, to slow things down and hold things back. It was meant to be a check on the President, the House of Representatives and popular passions.

“The Founding Fathers hoped there would not be parties.”

But they certainly foresaw the possibility of gridlock, and they weren’t necessarily against it. They intended that the Senate should stop, deliberate, ponder and amend legislation more cautiously than the House. The Senate would “check the inconsiderate and hasty proceedings” of the House, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut explained at the Constitutional Convention in 1787.

Emboldened by a sense that President Trump is vulnerable and that they could oppose him with impunity, Democrats have laid waste to most of his legislative agenda this year. Whether they displayed the “weight and wisdom” that the authors of the Constitution hoped to find in senators is a matter, at the very least, for debate.

But the Senate’s performance was “not inconsistent” with the Founders’ intentions. “They felt that you don’t want the people’s representatives running free,” he said. “They saw the Senate as a check on popular passions, and they saw the people who would sit in the Senate as generally more conservative” than the House.

If something awful happens to someone you don’t know, or perhaps dislike, you are likely to ignore it in the first instance, or may even applaud it in the latter instance.

If something awful happens to you or your loved ones, well, that’s a different story altogether. There will be no applause from you; there will be scorn and retribution if you can make that happen.

As the old saying goes; “It all depends on whose ox is gored.

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U.S. Constitution – Article 1 Section
Section 1 – The Legislature

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

Section 2 – The House

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen.

(Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.) (The previous sentence in parentheses was modified by the 14th Amendment, section 2.) The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner as they shall by Law direct. The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative; and until such enumeration shall be made, the State of New Hampshire shall be entitled to chuse three, Massachusetts eight, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations one, Connecticut five, New York six, New Jersey four, Pennsylvania eight, Delaware one, Maryland six, Virginia ten, North Carolina five, South Carolina five and Georgia three.

When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies.

The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.

Three issues—length of terms, equal versus proportional representation of states, and method of selection—dominated the Constitutional Convention’s debate over the makeup of the House of Representatives. They each were resolved in the language of Article I, Section 2.

The two-year term of office for the House was a straightforward compromise between those who preferred annual elections and those who favored a longer, three-year term. The original Virginia Plan envisaged that both branches of the federal legislature would be directly or indirectly accountable to “the People.” In the end, however, the Convention determined that the states would be represented in the Senate and the people in the House of Representatives. During the debate over equal or proportional state representation in the House, several delegates, notably James Wilson, James Madison, and George Mason, argued for population as the just basis of apportionment. That later became conflated with the related but distinct question on the manner of selection.

What the Framers intended in providing for election “by the People” can be better understood in terms of the alternatives that they rejected. The Committee of the Whole vigorously debated and discarded a counter resolution that the House be selected by “the State Legislatures, and not the People.” Elbridge Gerry suggested that Members be selected by state legislatures from among candidates “nominated by the people.” Another compromise, proposed by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, provided for the House to be selected “in such manner as the legislature of each state shall direct.” Against these proposals, Madison and Wilson argued that selection by the people was necessary to link citizens directly to the national government and to prevent the states from overpowering the central authority. Article I, Section 2, secured direct popular election of the House.

The scope of the phrase “by the People,” however, was neither debated nor defined at the Convention. It appears to have meant the direct popular election with a relatively broad right of suffrage as determined by the states’ own practices. Madison described electoral accountability to the people as “the republican principle.” The Federalist No. 10. Responding to charges that the House would not represent “the mass of the people,” Madison argued in The Federalist No. 57 that “the electors are to be the great body of people of the United States. They are to be the same who exercise the right in every State of electing the corresponding branch of the legislature of the State.” Leading Anti-Federalists, such as Melancton Smith and the anonymous Brutus, used the term in a similar fashion, affirming the broadly accepted meaning. Thomas Jefferson defined “the People” as no particular class but, rather, “the mass of individuals composing the society.”

Comments at both the Convention and at state ratifying conventions indicate substantial support for the general proposition that Representatives should be apportioned in a manner roughly equal to population. Nevertheless, it seems evident that the delegates did not intend to place any particular principle, such as “one person, one vote,” into the Constitution. “One person, one vote” was not the norm in the states at the time of the Convention. Although most states established districts roughly according to population, none came close to the “one person, one vote” standard. Geography, history, and local political boundaries cut against equally populated districts. Similarly, in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, Congress provided for up to one Representative per 500 persons, but based on townships and counties. Furthermore, besides the celebrated compromise providing each state with equal representation in the Senate, the Constitution specifically grants each state, no matter how small its population, one Representative in the House.

The Constitution, however, does not require Representatives to be elected by districts. In the beginning, many states had their Representatives elected at large. If a state chose its Representatives at large, then they were more likely to speak with one voice, thus increasing the influence of the state in the House of Representatives. Congress then responded by requiring states to elect its Representatives by district. For a brief time, some states required their Representatives to reside in the district from which they were elected, but that requirement no longer exists.

There was a limit, however, to what the states could do in fashioning congressional districts. The Framers did, in fact, disapprove of “rotten boroughs” in Great Britain, districts with no more than a few inhabitants that nevertheless held seats in Parliament equal, in some cases, to large cities. But they decided to address inequities in representation by leaving it to Congress’s discretion to “alter” the “Times, Places, and Manner” of choosing Members. (See Article I, Section 4.) Madison argued that this clause was a necessary safeguard against state-created inequalities in federal representation.

For most of the nation’s history, Section 4 was indeed held to be the sole remedy to malapportionment.

State redistricting plans, scrutinized under the Fourteenth Amendment* rather than Article I, have been granted more leeway. The Court has upheld state legislative districts with population variances up to ten percent with no state justification at all, Gaffney v. Cummings (1973), and variations to nearly twenty percent are permissible where the state demonstrates a rational basis for its plan, such as drawing districts to follow municipal lines. Mahan v. Howell (1973). Consideration of group or economic interests is not, however, an accepted justification. Swann v. Adams (1967).

Critics claim that they have inhibited the formation of regional government consortiums to deal with metropolitan-wide problems; removed traditional constraints on gerrymandering, such as adherence to political jurisdictions or geographic regions; and imposed a particular theory of representation on the states and Congress that is not grounded in the Constitution.

Critics also note that equal population does not correspond to an equal number of voters, due to differing numbers of children, immigrants, and other nonvoters in a district.** Thus votes are still not weighted equally. Nonetheless, the standard of “one person, one vote” remains Supreme Court doctrine.

*The fourteenth amendment and is questionable legality will be discussed later in this series.

**Supreme Court over reach is still a topic of hot discussion as it was in the time of President Andrew Jackson. Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. (6 Pet.) 515 (1832), was a case in which the United States Supreme Court vacated the conviction of Samuel Worcester and held that the Georgia criminal statute that prohibited non-Native Americans from being present on Native American lands without a license from the state was unconstitutional.

Chief Justice John Marshall laid out in this opinion that the relationship between the Indian Nations and the United States is that of nations. He reasoned that the United States, in the character of the federal government, inherited the rights of Great Britain as they were held by that nation. Those rights, he stated, include the sole right to deal with the Indian nations in North America, to the exclusion of any other European power. This did not include the rights of possession to their land or political dominion over their laws. He acknowledged that the exercise of conquest and purchase can give political dominion, but those are in the hands of the federal government, and individual states had no authority in American Indian affairs. Georgia’s statute was therefore invalid.

President Andrew Jackson reportedly responded: “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it!” This derives from Jackson’s comments on the case in a letter to John Coffee, “…the decision of the Supreme Court has fell still born, and they find that they cannot coerce Georgia to yield to its mandate”

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“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

The Preamble was placed in the Constitution more or less as an afterthought. It was not proposed or discussed on the floor of the Constitutional Convention.

Gouverneur Morris, a delegate from Pennsylvania who as a member of the Committee of Style actually drafted the near-final text of the Constitution, composed it at the last moment.

The Preamble does not have any substantive legal meaning.

Preambles are merely declaratory and are not to be read as granting or limiting power—a view sustained by the Supreme Court in Jacobson v. Massachusetts (1905). It does, however, specifies the purposes for which the Constitution exists.

As Justice Joseph Story put it in his celebrated Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, “its true office is to expound the nature and extent and application of the powers actually conferred by the Constitution.”

The very opening words of the Constitution mark a radical departure: “We the People of the United States.” That language was at striking variance with the norm. In earlier documents, including the 1778 treaty of alliance with France, the Articles of Confederation, and the 1783 Treaty of Paris recognizing American independence, the word “People” was not used.

The Preamble’s first-mentioned purpose of the Constitution, “to form a more perfect Union,” was likewise subjected to misreading by Anti-Federalists. “More perfect” may strike modern readers as an ambiguous depiction, for “perfect” is now regarded as an absolute term. At the time of the Framing, however, it had no such connotation. For example, Sir William Blackstone, in his widely read Commentaries on the Laws of England, could assert that the constitution of England was perfect but steadily improving. Thus a more perfect union was simply a better and stronger one than had preexisted the Constitution.

In the second stated objective, to “establish Justice,” the key word is “establish,” clearly implying that justice, unlike union, was previously nonexistent. On the face of it, that implication seems hyperbolic, for the American states and local governments had functioning court systems with independent judges, and trial by jury was the norm.

But Gouverneur Morris chose the word carefully and meant what he wrote; he and many other Framers thought that the states had run amok and had trampled individual liberties in a variety of ways. The solution was twofold: the establishment of an independent Supreme Court and the provision for a federal judiciary superior to those of the states; and outright prohibition of egregious state practices. (How far our current government has come from the original intent of the preamble and, indeed, as we will see, the intent of the Constitution in the whole!)

The third avowed purpose, to “insure domestic Tranquility,” was in a general sense prompted by the long-standing habit of Americans to take up arms against unpopular government measures and was more immediately a response to Shay’s Rebellion in Massachusetts (1786–1787) and lesser uprisings in New Hampshire and Delaware.

The fourth purpose, to “provide for the common defense,” is obvious—after all, it was the reason the United States came into being. Congress expected that other wars would occur and were determined to be prepared to fight them. The Framers did, however, take fears of standing armies into account, hence their commitment to civilian control of things military.

The fifth purpose, to “promote the general Welfare,” had a generally understood meaning at the time of the Constitution. The concept will be developed fully in the discussion of the Spending Clause of Article I, Section 8. The salient point is that its implications are negative, not positive—a limitation on power, not a grant of power. By definition “general” means applicable to the whole rather than to particular parts or special interests.

The sixth purpose of the Constitution is to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” In broad terms the securing of liberty is a function of the whole Constitution, for the Constitution makes possible the establishment of a government of laws, and liberty without law is meaningless.

Some historians have argued that the philosophy or ideology of the Constitution was at variance with that of the Declaration of Independence; indeed, several have described the adoption of the Constitution as a counter-Revolution.

But consider this. The Declaration refers to God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The Preamble introduces a document whose stated purpose is to secure the rights of life and liberty.

And what of happiness? Once again the word “Welfare” is crucial: in the eighteenth century the definition of welfare included well-being, but it also and equally encompassed happiness.

The Preamble as a whole, then, declares that the Constitution is designed to secure precisely the rights proclaimed in the Declaration.

NEXT: Article I: Legislative

 

This page and its links contain opinion. As with all opinion, it should not be relied upon without independent verification. Think for yourself. Fair Use is relied upon for all content. For educational purposes only. No claims are made to the properties of third parties.

(c) 2018