The impact of Constitutional compromises on us today발음듣기
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The impact of Constitutional compromises on us today
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And the debates and the compromises it's easy to assume that, okay that's interesting from a historical point of view but how does it affect me today?발음듣기
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Well the simple answer is, it affects you incredibly those compromises that were made over 200 years ago.발음듣기
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Well, to even start to appreciate the compromises let's start with this picture, or this chart of the census in 1790, so it gives a pretty good snapshot of what the United States looked like after the Constitution was ratified.발음듣기
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So, as you can see, the population as a whole was much smaller than it is today it was roughly, a little under four million people today the United States is over 300 million people.발음듣기
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You have big states, like Virginia which, at the time, had 750,000 people and then you had small states like Delaware that had 60,000 people, or you have Rhode Island that has a little under 70,000 people.발음듣기
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And so you can imagine, the Virginians or the people from Massachusetts might have said hey we want representation in the legislative in Congress, to be based on population.발음듣기
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It should be, you know, we have a lot of people we should get more of a say while someone from, say, Delaware might say, wait, hold on a second under the Articles of Confederation we were a sovereign state발음듣기
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We don't wanna just become, you know, do whatever the Virginians or the people from Massachusetts wanna do we wanna have a more equal say and of course, the big state folks would have said whoa, no.발음듣기
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Then your population, people in your population in your state, are going to be overrepresented.발음듣기
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The Great Compromise, which is probably the most cited compromise coming out of the US Constitution.발음듣기
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In the legislative, let's create two houses let's do one house that is based on population so the House of Representatives where Virginia will get more representation than a Delaware.발음듣기
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But let's make another house called the Senate where every state has equal representation where you have two senators per state.발음듣기
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And to appreciate that this is even today, a controversial thing here is an article from the New York Times, from 2013.발음듣기
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This is an article that's talking about perceived inequalities of per person federal funding.발음듣기
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And it says, and the article is literally named, 'Big State, Small State,' "Vermont's 625,000 residents have two United States senators, and so do New York's 19 million."발음듣기
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That means that a Vermonter has 30 times the voting power in the Senate of a New Yorker just over the state line, the biggest inequality between two adjacent states.발음듣기
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So they're making the argument that, at least in the Senate a person in Vermont has 30 times the representation as a person in New York.발음듣기
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And they say, "The difference reflects the growing disparity in their citizens' voting power, and it is not an anomaly."발음듣기
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So this is coming straight out of the Great Compromise, "but the size and importance of the gap has grown markedly in recent decades, in ways the framers probably never anticipated."발음듣기
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So you can imagine, this is the New York Times so they probably might favor a little bit more representation for New Yorkers but it's an interesting thing to think about.발음듣기
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Could they have predicted how much the United States would grow, or get a movement to the cities even in that census of 1790 we saw a factor of a little more than 10발음듣기
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There's no right answer, here but it is something very interesting to think about and as you can see, it's something that people are even talking about today.발음듣기
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Now, the other significant compromise that is also talked a lot about, these days is the notion of the electoral college.발음듣기
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So, people who are more in the anti-Federalist camp they were more in favor of a participatory democracy a direct democracy, where you have one person one vote and whoever gets the majority of the vote in the country well, maybe they should be president.발음듣기
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But Federalists, especially folks like James Madison they were a little suspicious of just the crowd voting whoever they wanted.발음듣기
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They wanted it to go through a filter with the idea that maybe that filter could temper the passions of the crowd, so to speak and so they devised this system where it isn't one person one vote but every state has a certain number of electors.발음듣기
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So you vote for electors, and then the states send them and then they can place their vote for President.발음듣기
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It turns out that most states have decided to have a winner take all policy so that maybe they could matter more for the Presidential election.발음듣기
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But what that's resulted in, is if you take a big state like Texas, and just draw a quick drawing of Texas or a big state like California, right over here in a winner take all, as soon as you cross 50%,발음듣기
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you get 50.1% in either one of these states and in other big states, it's true in most states well then you'll get all of the electors for that state.발음듣기
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So even if you get 70% of the vote in Texas or 70% of the vote of California it's equivalent to getting 50.1%.발음듣기
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The reason why this has resulted in some significant debate in the recent past, you had two major elections where the electoral college majority was different than the popular majority.발음듣기
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Now, two of the other major compromises that came out of the Constitutional Convention are less debated today, and that's a good thing because they were resolved, finally in 1865 by the 13th amendment that came out of the Civil War.발음듣기
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You have the 3/5 Compromise and this is, actually, still more of a notion around representation.발음듣기
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Even in the House, how do you determine the population that's gonna dictate how many representatives you get?발음듣기
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If you look back to this chart right over here notice some of the southern states had a significant fraction of their population that were slaves.발음듣기
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And so you can imagine that their delegates were saying, hey, we wanna count them in the population.발음듣기
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They didn't want them to vote but they said, hey, when we decide how many representatives we get we wanna count these 293,000 people in Virginia when we decide how many representatives they get.발음듣기
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And you can imagine, other states either just because they didn't wanna dilute their own representation or maybe even some of them might have felt morally against something like slavery said, wait, no.발음듣기
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You shouldn't get a benefit because you're doing this thing called slavery and so they were against it.발음듣기
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And so the compromise, and once again, James Madison was significantly involved here was the 3/5 Compromise.발음듣기
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That for determining representation a slave would count as 3/5 of a person which is offensive to our sensibilities.발음듣기
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But that's the compromise they came up with but it didn't become, it wasn't an issue anymore once slavery was abolished by the 13th amendment.발음듣기
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The last major compromise that people will talk about and this one also revolves around slavery is the importation, importation of slaves.발음듣기
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During the Revolution, because Great Britain had such a significant role in the slave trade the colonies, or the states, the nascent states were pretty unified around not participating at least with Great Britain.발음듣기
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Some states did not want more importation of slaves some did, and so the compromise that was reached is that at least for 20 years the Congress would not pass a law that is prohibiting the importation of slaves.발음듣기
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And it turns out, almost exactly 20 years later once that expired from the Constitution under Thomas Jefferson, they did ban the importation of slaves officially although it still continued to some degree at a much smaller level.발음듣기
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I'll leave you there, but the big appreciation here is that those debates that we talk about the Great Compromise, the electoral college these debates around representation that we saw over 200 years ago these are things that people still feel passionate about and they still debate today.발음듣기
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