==================== 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of course; for Pennsylvania see the historiographical essay I wrote for Greenwood Press's volume Pennsylvania History, unpublished manuscripts, and article co-authored (ghost co-authored ...)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 ============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]