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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Greenwood Press's volume Pennsylvania History, unpublished  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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