Florida, with its 29 electoral votes, is a good example. It is through the legislative branch Congress and the executive branch the President, who is elected by the Electoral College that the Great Compromise affects the United States today. Collectively, these are referred to as the U. The Great Compromise balances out concerns about representation based on population — although larger states have more power in the House of Representatives, all states have the same amount of power in the Senate.
Read our privacy policy for more info. Check your inbox or spam folder to confirm your subscription. Leaving a comment is also the best way to reach the management team of ConstitutionUS. Your email address will not be published.
Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. The Great Compromise. Table of Contents. The debate almost destroyed the U. The disagreement over representation threatened to derail the ratification of the U. The solution came in the form of a compromise proposed by statesmen Roger Sherman and Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut.
The Great Compromise created two legislative bodies in Congress. Also known as the Sherman Compromise or the Connecticut Compromise, the deal combined proposals from the Virginia large state plan and the New Jersey small state plan. According to the Great Compromise, there would be two national legislatures in a bicameral Congress. In , the Seventeenth Amendment was passed, tweaking the Senate system so that Senators would be elected by the people. George Washington presiding over the Constitutional Convention, In other words, both houses included a population proportional representation.
Madison also proposed that Congress get a veto for all state laws. The New Jersey Plan, put forward on June 15, , by William Patterson, called for equal representation of each state like it was in the Articles of Confederation system but sought to increase Congress power. It called for a one-house legislature, equal representation of each state, and popular elections. Patterson also proposed a lifetime Supreme Court appointed by executive officers.
He focused on the probability that the national government would violate the sovereignty of the states. At this point, the less populous states representatives feared that the agreement would result in larger states drowning the voices and interests rendering them useless in the national scale. Madison, on the other hand, argued that the most important states were very different from each other. Hamilton pointed out that each state was an artificial entity made up of individuals. He thus accused smaller states of being power hungry.
The disagreements called for reflection leading to a negotiation on how to determine the future of the US government. Roger Sherman, a Connecticut delegate suggested a plan that eventually turned out as the Great Compromise. His plan included a two-legislative form of government in the US, the Senate and the House of Representatives.
For every , citizens, a state received one member to serve in the House of representative and two senators. Delegate Gunning Bedford, Jr. Connecticut delegate Roger Sherman is credited with proposing the alternative of a "bicameral," or two-chambered Congress made up of a Senate and a House of Representatives.
Each state, suggested Sherman, would send an equal number of representatives to the Senate, and one representative to the House for every 30, residents of the state.
At the time, all the states except Pennsylvania had bicameral legislatures, so the delegates were familiar with the structure of Congress proposed by Sherman. The structure and powers of the new U. Congress, as proposed by the delegates of the Constitutional Convention, were explained to the people by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers. The process of fairly determining the number of members of the House from each state is called " apportionment.
The first census in counted 4 million Americans. Based on that count, the total number of members elected to the House of Representatives grew from the original 65 to The current House membership of was set by Congress in In the case of Reynolds v.
Sims , the U. Supreme Court ruled that all of the congressional districts in each state must all have roughly the same population. Through apportionment and redistricting, high population urban areas are prevented from gaining an inequitable political advantage over less populated rural areas. For example, if New York City were not split into several congressional districts, the vote of a single New York City resident would carry more influence on the House than all of the residents in the rest of the State of New York combined.
While the populations of the states varied in , the differences were far less pronounced than they are today.
0コメント