re: #157 Eclectic Cyborg

And the Founders thought this convoluted system was a good idea because?

Besides everything that’s been said up above, by the time even the Articles of Confederation rolled around, the Founders had started to feel that the mechanism responsible for denying colonial representation in Parliament was less His Majesty and more Parliament itself. The last thing they wanted was a unitary parliamentarian government, so with the Articles, they went as far from one as they could. Shays’s Rebellion showed that the Articles’ governmental structure didn’t and couldn’t work, but they were still never going to establish a Westminster system, and figured that they still wanted squabbling fiefdoms, just not quite so powerless as the ones in the Articles.

That meant a Commons analog in the House of Representatives; I’m honestly moderately surprised they didn’t go with 4-year terms offset from the President’s instead of running the risk that coattails could turn the House in the President’s favour for the first two years of his (I use that advisedly; I’m ‘only’ 41, but now expect only male Presidents in my lifetime) term. The Senate was set up to be two things: a check on the House’s “Commons”-type fire, and a directed voice for the state legislatures in the national capitol’s halls. Since it was foreseen that most, if not all, state legislatures would also be constituted in the election that named presidential electors, they’d be just as prone to influence from presidential campaigns as the House was—and since they were supposed to be extra-protective of the legislative fiefdom, it wouldn’t do to have them all appointed in the same year a President was elected. Plus, each year-class was intended to be somewhat-in-opposition to the others—more of the Founders wanting squabbling fiefdoms.

The majority of the Founders thought of the US more as an equivalent to today’s UN than to today’s US or even EU, and they were trying to keep it just as powerless. Then the War of 1812 happened with a few of them still around and they figured out that they were prey for re-colonisation unless they gave still more power to the central government. There’s still an argument whether anyone but the Know-Nothings saw the US as a single nation-state even then, though.