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Old ideas about "US Presidency" - Maxmars - 06-03-2024
I ran across an article in MentalFloss.com: 5 Wild Ideas Rejected by the Constitutional Convention
The article is about a number of salient propositions to the constitution... you know, that seminally important document that actually established our framework for governance. The authors had spent a lot of effort and time, not hobnobbing at the club, or making public appearances, and/or polishing their... egos. Instead they actually labored to create a framework that didn't reduce the citizenry to 'cattle to be managed.'
They formally recognized the human voice as a significant and important thing to be protected. They made certain that if the framework needed to grow and live - it would. They even labored removed status as a determinant of value for justice, allowing justice to be informed by the people, all equal (at least in theory, at the time.)
But the context of time is important to remember. While this effort was underway, most were reeling from a bloody war on their own soil... war is always tragic. I think they can be excused for the myopia they sometimes manifested. Some of the authors were evidently aware of this. In that light, they attempted to ensure that the framework would bend and adapt to whatever may come, rather than snap and shatter over each crisis.
The points of the article that most caught my attention were the one's relating to the presidency.
Once upon a time, there was a consideration of having three presidents...
The idea spawned from a sensitivity, in part heightened by recent events, to the idea that a one-man show was too much like a Royal power. In essence, "a King would be installed under a new name" was likely a common rejection of the notion of one president.
Instead, Randolph’s idea was to elect a council of three presidents, each from a different part of the country. As wild as this sounds to our modern ears, it was nothing compared to what Benjamin Franklin had once suggested: That “instead of a president, the Congress appoint a 12-person ‘executive council’ whose members would serve for staggered three-year terms,” writes Walter Isaacson in Smithsonian magazine.
The end discussion cautioned against creating an executive office mired in in-fighting... and ultimately James Wilson's suggestion of a single president prevailed (but there was a row over it.)
However that presidency eventually evolved, the Founders could never have anticipated the actual powers the president eventually wielded. Such is politics.
There was also a First Amendment that specified that representatives of the people were obliged to vote "as instructed" by their constituents. That when the people said "yea" or "nay" the representative must report that and cast a vote strictly by the people's express will... THAT was rejected. And I'm not sure they were wrong to do so, but in hindsight it is much easier to never be wrong. James Madison and other founders feared "mob rule" and refused the inclusion of the word "Instruct." And once again, in a timeline context, these leaders had seen some incredibly barbaric outcomes from 'mob rule' overseas, and were right to fear it.
Another idea about the Presidency is discussed...
As I mentioned, some delegates feared the president would become a king. The three-presidents idea was shot down, but there were several other ideas on how to stop the president from morphing into a tyrant. One proposal was to turbo-charge the power of the president’s cabinet, requiring the president to get its approval before acting. If this had come to pass, Joe Biden would have needed Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s thumbs-up before signing a law.
Another proposal was for the Congress to elect the president. The House and Senate—not American citizens or the electoral college—would choose who occupied the Oval Office...
That would have been a game-changer for sure. Allowing all executive action to become subject to a consensus of a committee would cripple us in times of crisis, and engender the exact kind of 'gamesmanship' plaguing us today to have been there from the start. The banks would own us all... I mean more so.
Ultimately I'm glad for the efforts of a few thinkers to craft such a framework, and no, it's not perfect... but then what is?
I hope you enjoy the article.
RE: Old ideas about "US Presidency" - Maxmars - 06-04-2024
I am going to move this to the History Forum... it seems a better fit.
