The Quirks and Idiosyncrasies of American “Democracy”

Letters to Seffican

The answer to why we have such trouble finding leaders is that often, anyone who addresses national problems and promises to find solutions for them, loses to someone pandering to local and parochial interests

By Anil Madan

There is an incoherent coherence to America’s system of government. We often refer to our system as a representative democracy. The idea underlying such a democracy is that the election of representatives by the people (meaning, by a majority of the people) creates a body that will, on their behalf, pass legislation and manage the functioning of the government. Inherent in this type of governance is the expectation that elected representatives will appoint, designate, or employ competent functionaries to perform tasks essential to the efficient functioning of the government.

American Democracy. Pic – USSUSA.Org

That concept is simple and straightforward enough, but the structure of the American federal system has more layers to it. It is well known that the American Republic is a federation of sovereign states each of which has agreed, by accepting the terms of a written Constitution, to form a union and to delegate specified powers to a national or federal government.

Powers that are not delegated to the federal government are deemed to be retained by each state. As a practical matter, the sweep of federal power can be extremely broad and this often creates tension between the states and the federal government, but the federal government often prevails because the Constitution can be interpreted to confer sweeping powers to uphold most Congressional actions.

The federal government has three principal functions: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. In theory, this structure is one of checks and balances, each co-equal branch checking the power — or rather the abuse of power — by the others.

Our system of government does not, however, choose the head of the Executive Branch (the President), or Members of the Senate to reflect a truly democratic government. And whereas we think of the judiciary as being one of the essential checks on the other two branches — mostly by ensuring that their actions conform to the Constitution and that they can be held to account for their omissions — as a practical matter, that is far from reality.

A bit of American history

Let us survey a bit of American history to get a better understanding of this quirks. The fundamental premise of a Democracy is that there is one vote for each person. But that is not how the United States started out. At the outset, women, Native Americans (American Indians) and slaves were not allowed to vote. So much for one man, one vote.

An additional complication was caused by the three-fifths clause. In a quirky way, without referring directly to slaves, the Constitution declared that, to the total number of free persons, excluding [American] Indians not taxed, there would be added three-fifths of all other persons. The point was to keep the northern states in which slavery had been abolished, from dominating the southern states. By counting the slaves as three-firths of a person, the population of the southern states was effectively inflated so that the system of appointing representatives to the House of Representatives in Congress, would prevent the northern states from dominating the House. Never mind that the slaves could not vote, it was enough to shift the balance of power to have them count, as part of the population, by counting a fraction of each person.

The Legislative Branch was divided into two chambers, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. But only the Members of the House were chosen directly by the majority vote of the people in districts within the several states. This was representative democracy in its purest form, except for that three-fifths embellishment. How did that work? Well, the solution was that the number of Representatives in the House for each state was determined by the population of the state, one Representative for “a discrete number” of so many people. We do not need to elaborate on the “so many” because the number changed as America’s population grew. Each state was to have at least one Representative, and the population was to be counted every ten years by taking a census.

And what about the Senate? Each state would appoint two Senators no matter how large or small its population. This, of course, detracted from the idea of a democratic government by giving states with smaller populations, a disproportionately larger voice in the affairs of government. By the terms of the original US Constitution, Senators were chosen by their respective state legislatures, meaning that each state’s elected representatives to the local government would vote to select their state’s senators.  However, this system was changed with the ratification of the 17th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1913, which established that Senators are now directly elected by the people of each state through popular vote.

With 50 states in the Union, there are 100 Senators. The number of Representatives in the House is now 435. Read More… Become a Subscriber

Mauritius Times ePaper Friday 1 November 2024