A Senate of the States: July 21st – July 23rd, 1787

Article V Blog ^ | December 7th, 2017 | Rodney Dodsworth

[Jacquerie]

Since delegates resolved, on July 16th, the most contentious issue of the convention, equality of state suffrage in the senate, they quickly hammered out over twenty other fundamental resolutions in the next week. The Connecticut Compromise smoothed the way toward fitting the remaining pieces of our Constitutional puzzle.

Among unresolved fundamental resolutions were judicial appointments. James Madison’s Virginia Plan of Government envisioned a bicameral congress, comprising a popularly elected house of representatives, and a senate appointed by the house of representatives. It also featured a judiciary powerful enough to check congress. Not only could the judiciary veto unconstitutional laws, it also made statutory policy decisions through a ‘Council of Revision’(8th Resolution). In this, a select number of supreme court justices, along with the chief executive, held a qualified veto over congressional bills and state laws. As odd as it sounds today, since congress nominated and appointed the chief executive, who had only the dim executive powers of the confederation, the added heft of another branch was a logical check in opposition to a popularly derived and powerful house and insular senate.

Madison explained that “experience in all the states had evinced a powerful tendency in the legislature to absorb all power into its vortex.” He believed that this tendency was the real source of danger to the American Constitution. He urged his colleagues to protect against this grave threat by allowing the judiciary to fortify the president in defending against the overreach of the legislature.

The 9th Resolution of the VA Plan proposed both congressional nomination and appointment of federal judges. On July 21st, the convention revisited the 8th and 9th Resolutions with an eye on a senate, not appointed by the house and not represented in numbers proportional to population, but . . .