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Date: | Fri Mar 31 17:19:12 2006 |
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==================== HES POSTING =======================
Also --
The President/Senate/House configuration borrows strongly from the
standard Governor/Council/House configuration of most of the
Commonwealths both before and after the Revolution.
The biggest intellectual problem that had to be solved to be able
to mimic the "perfect balance" of the British "constitution" was
the absence of any acknowledged aristocracy in America -- a
problem fenessed in Massachusetts when the second commonwealth
constitution was ratified, and also in Pennsylvania -- where
the opponents of Pennsylvania's "radical" constitution had to come
up with good arguments as to why there should not be a single
chamber legislature -- and the answer was the concept of the
"natural aristocracy" -- those separate by breeding or eduation
or "virtue" from the masses.
Hence we have the perfectly balanced republic: democracy in the
House and the open election of a national president, "aristocracy"
in the Senate, the judiciary, and the electoral college, and
"monarchy" in the role of the president and the executive branch.
Citation: Gordon Wood's Creation of the American Republic, of course;
for Pennsylvania see the historiographical essay I wrote for
Greenwood Press's volume Pennsylvania History, unpublished
manuscripts, and article co-authored (ghost co-authored ...) with
Chief Justice N.C. Nix. Jr., of the PA Supreme Court on Pennsylvania's
Contributions to the Writing and the Ratification of the Constitution,
in the PMHB, 1988, also in the Supreme Court collection of essays
in honor of the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution,
and the work of Jack Greene, Jack Pole, and others on the whole
Court and Country issue in American colonial politics.
Whew.
Mary Schweitzer
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