Since government power and the Constitution are on everyone’s mind these days, and since the Constitution greatly interests me, I thought this week I would add my two cents.

First, the Constitution did not establish a democracy, it established a republic.  In a democracy the people rule, which means that our elected representatives would have to do whatever the majority of their constituents wanted them to do on a particular issue.  That could — and, in fact, before the Constitution was ratified, it did — threaten the rights of the many minority groups within the 13 states.  Protecting minority rights is one reason the Founders created the Constitution.

By contrast, in a republic, elected representatives are tasked with balancing what the majority wants against their own best judgments as experienced legislators.   The Founders had a healthy skepticism about the people’s willingness to subjugate their own self interests for the good of the whole so they created “auxiliary protections” (James Madison’s words) against pure democratic government.

Second, the Founders did not create a Constitution designed to keep government small. They created a Constitution designed to keep government limited, which is a very different thing.  As to those responsibilities that the Constitution assigned to the national government — foreign policy and national defense, for example — the Founders wanted the government to be big enough — to have enough power — to meet those responsibilities. But the Constitution also limits the government’s responsibilities; it gives it a finite number of enumerated powers and responsibilities, and the list is not long.  All other powers (there are specific exceptions) are supposed to belong to the states.

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One of the thornier issues facing the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, which began this week (May 25) in 1787, was how to apportion representation in the House of Representatives. Previously it had been agreed that the Senate would have equal representation, regardless of a state’s population, but in the House, representation was to be based on the number of people residing in the state.

Sort of.  It depended on how you defined “people” because, in an astonishing reversal of their long-held position that slaves were merely property, southern delegates to the convention suddenly insisted that slaves were people — just like you or me — and should count the same as whites in determining a state’s population, and therefore the number of representatives it sent to Congress.

Not surprisingly, delegates from the northern free states quickly reversed their long-held position that slaves were human beings. They argued that if slaves, which had always been considered property, were suddenly to become people, then why couldn’t horses and cows, which also were property, also be counted for the purposes of determining congressional representation?

To see these two positions, so passionately held in the past, so suddenly reversed and even exchanged in 1787 would have been comical had the issue not been so grave and the stakes so high.  The southern slave states were keenly aware that the North’s white population far exceeded theirs, and should only whites be considered for representation purposes, the North would dominate the House of Representatives, which at that time was considered the more important congressional body.  Principle was one thing. Self interest and the power needed to protect it were something else entirely.

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