The relative uselessness of the office of Vice President has been a feature of the system from the very beginning and a perennial source of humor. Placing that individual as President of the Senate was a threat to the latter body that in the case of persistent deadlock the Executive would make up their collective mind for them, a deliberate risk with a specific end in mind. I'd call it a very interesting bit of systems feedback in today's terms. It was meant to be a rare circumstance and has proven so.
Changing the ratio of House members from one for every 40,000 people to one for every 30,000 only delayed the inevitable certainty that as the country grew one of two things would happen: either the House would grow so large that debate would be impossible or the ratio would grow so large that representation would become far less direct than originally intended. Madison called that one and so did Jefferson. The federal government was always intended to be distilled through the intermediary of state government, a role that had steadily diminished even before the events of the Civil War, was exacerbated by direct election of senators, and now is atrophied, simultaneously with the growth of the inability of the federal government to provide direct representation by itself. I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that the federal government has become an unwieldy, unresponsive, bull-headed dictatorial monster in the absence of this means of citizen input. But I don't think that it was ever a role that the federal government could do very well from its very design. There are just too many people in the country to admit it. The most workable alternative, in my view, is to re-empower the state governments because they're the only ones who can, by their size and distribution, be close enough to the citizen to allow for the direct representation that was always the intention of the Founders.
And it may be that the country is now to big to allow that, in which case the principle of a distributed government suggests that the county and city governments may now be the proper repositories of direct representation. The challenge then will be the methods chosen to force both state and federal governments to be responsive to them. It can be done, but not without a deliberate, long-term, concerted effort that will be resisted fanatically by those for whom centralization of power without accountability is desirable. These are not our friends.
Mr. Mason's motion to include a Bill of Rights was voted down by all the States. There is something “there” when he couldn't swing even one state, including his own, especially considering most States had a Bill of Rights.
As for the rest of his objections, it is a matter of opinion as to whether they should have been corrected. Others, such his support of occasional ex-post facto laws, strike the modern ear as at least odd and perhaps dangerous to our liberty.
Two of his objections, had they been corrected, may well have torpedoed the Convention. One, the furor over Navigation Acts and second, a ban on any law that impaired slave importation for 20 years.
As tomorrow's post will show, objections were common. No one was entirely satisfied. The Constitution ultimately was an armistice among men who had become convinced their common interest would never be realized until they budged off their local, special interests.