Governments, Including The Government Of The United States, Are Not Ne

Governments, including the government of the United States, are not neutral. They represent dominant economic interests and their constitutions are intended to serve these interests. The Constitution of the United States is the central instrument of American government and supreme law of the land. For 200 years, it has guided the evolution of governmental institutions and has provided the basis for political stability, economic growth and social progress. It is almost universally agreed that the delegates to the Constitutional Convention drafted an amazing document. However, this does not mean that those drafting the Constitution completely put aside all economic and sectional interests. In fact, they did not. As a result, the Constitution in its original form, while remarkable in many ways, was the result of disagreements among the drafters. A jumble of compromises, the new Constitution was geared toward the advantaged and the wealthy and not wholly representative of the new nation's rich diversity. One thing the delegates did agree upon was the sense of potential disaster and the need for drastic change. All of the delegates were convinced that an effective central government with a wide range of enforceable powers must replace the impotent Congress established by the Articles of Confederation. Beyond that, sharp differences of opinion, often based on sectional or economic differences, threatened at times to disrupt the Convention and cut short its proceedings before a constitution was even drafted. A good example of sectional bickering was the debate over state's representation in Congress. The larger state's argued in favor of proportional representation in the legislature--each state should have voting power according to its population. The smaller states, fearing domination by larger ones, insisted on equal representation. The issue was settled by the "Great Compromise," giving every state equal representation in one house of Congress, and proportional representation in the other. In the Senate, every state would have two seats. In the House of Representatives, the number of seats would depend on population. Another compromise made based on sectional differences was the 3/5 compromise that dealt with the counting of slave for representation purposes. Southern states, wanting to increase their amount of power in Congress wanted slaves to be counted just as everyone else. The North, attempting to maintain its advantage in population wanted slaves to be left out of the counting. It was eventually settled that each slave would be counted as 3/5 of a person. Were the Founding Fathers wise and just men arguing over the philosophies behind the new government and trying to achieve a good balance? In fact they did not want a balance at all, except one that kept things as they were, a balance between the dominant forces at the time. A fair and just government for all the inhabitants of the United States would not have been in their economic interests at all and thus most of their disagreements were based of economic grounds. They certainly did not want an equal balance between slaves and masters, propertyless and property holders, Indians and white, women and men. A majority of the delegates were lawyers by profession and were generally men of wealth in land, slaves, manufacturing or shipping. Thus, most of the makers of the Constitution had a direct economic interest in establishing a strong federal government. Yet the delegates were hesitant, they knew the Constitution would never be ratified if it served only their economic interests in the form of strong central government. They had to compromise. The Constitution, then, illustrates the complexity of the American system: that it serves the wealthy elite, but also does enough for small property owners and the middle class to build a broad base of support. This base of support was used a buffer against blacks, Indians and poor whites. Four groups were not represented in the Constitutional Convention however, slave, indentured servants, women and men without property. And so the Constitution did not reflect the interests of those groups. The Constitutional Convention was not the angelic, intellectual free exchange of ideas many people believe it to be. The Constitution is a jumble of compromises stemming from sectional and economic interests of those who drafted it. Qualifications for voting at state levels required in most cases the owning of property and excluded women, Indians and slaves. There were no popular elections to the higher offices of the federal government, the people were originally only allowed to vote for state officials. Though the people had to be checked, Madison wrote in his Federalist Papers, men of substance a