Unfinished business from last time:
For Wednesday,
- Hamilton, Federalist # 1, 8, 9, 10 49.
- Akhil Reed Amar, "Founding Myths," ch. 2 of Myth America, ed. Kevin M. Kruse and Julian E. Zelizer (New York: Basic, 2022) IN SAKAI RESOURCES AND CANVAS FILES.
What did you think of these model constitutional provisions?*
Backdrop
- The Boston Tea Party was not about a tax increase.
- Revolution
- Articles of Confederation
- The map:
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.
Akhil Amar on the Three-Fifths Clause:
The radical vice of Article I as drafted and ratified was that it gave slaveholding regions extra clout in every election as far as the eye could see - a political gift that kept giving. And growing. Unconstrained by any explicit intrastate equality norm in Article I, and emboldened by the federal [3/5] ratio, many slave states in the antebellum era skewed their congressional-district maps in favor of slaveholding regions within the state. Thus the House not only leaned south, but also within coastal slave states bent east, toward tidewater plantations that grabbed more than their fair share of seats. ... The very foundation of the Constitution’s first branch was tilted and rotten.
And not just the first branch. The Article II electoral college sat atop the Article I base: The electors who picked the president would be apportioned according to the number of seats a state had in the House and Senate. In turn, presidents would nominate cabinet heads, Supreme Court justices, and other Article III judges.
Five of the first seven presidents were slaveholders, for thirty-two of the nation’s first thirty-six years forty of its first forty-eight, fifty of its first sixty four, the nation’s president was a slaveholder. The powerful office of Speaker of the House was held by a slaveholder for twenty-eight of the nation’s first thirty-five years. The president pro tem of the Senate was virtually always a slaveholder. The majority of the cabinet members and — very important — of justices of the Supreme Court were slaveholders. The slaveholding Chief Justice Roger Taney, appointed by slaveholding President Andrew Jackson to succeed the slaveholding John Marshall, would serve all the way through the decades before the war into the years of the Civil War itself; it would be a radical change of the kind slaveholders feared when in 1863, President Lincoln would appoint the anti-slavery politician Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to succeed Taney.
- Fed 1: "government from reflection and choice [not] accident and force."
- "Writtenness"
- Minimalism (compare with other countries)
- Rigidity
- Decision rules (process, not outcome): contrast with California
- Institutional Competition
- Federalism
- Bicameralism
- Separation of Powers
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