Pros And Cons Of The Framers

After America’s fight for freedom and the brief period of time when there was no human being ruling over them, the Framers saw this as their chance to reinvent the country. However, the Framers viewed people as “an atom of self-interest”, meaning that they only care about their personal success and necessities. This became difficult during the secretive meetings of the Constitutional Convention, as they were trying to start forming what would be the Constitution. It became clearer that “this distrust in man was a first and foremost concern”. At the time, the Framers believed that men “of affairs, merchants, lawyers, planter-businessmen, speculators, investors (essentially middle and lower-class citizens) were evil, selfish, contentious.” The

The Framers introduced three different devices into the Constitution for keeping each other in check. The first of these advantages were an element in maintaining a sense of order against a popular uprising or majority ruling. If in a state, a faction were to arise and take complete control of the state by force, it could absolutely happen and be allowed, but if the states were bound in a federation, the central government could prevent the faction from uprising and taking over. However, if the “ political society were very extensive and embrace a large number and variety of local interests, the citizens who shared a common majority interest” must be rendered by their local situation. The second of these advantages of good constitutional government was based on the mechanism of representation itself. A representative government would “refine and enlarge the public views by passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citizens.” Representatives that are decided upon by the people were smarter and more observant to a citizen’s or state’s individual benefits or needs, and are able to recognize problems faster than a mass assemblage of people. The third advantage of the new government was “pointed out most elaborately by John Adams in the first volume of his Defence of the Constitution of Government of the United States of America, which reached Philadelphia while the Convention was in session and was cited with approval by several delegates. He believed aristocracy and democracy should be merged in place to neutralize each other. Each element should be given its own house, and over each house, there should be a strong and impartial executive armed with veto power set in place. This assembly would hold itself in a natural and would be capable of control over the governing of the executive. “The whole system was to be capped by an independent judiciary. The inevitable tendency of the rich and the poor to plunder each other would be kept in