September 13th, 2012

For the past couple days in American History we have been leaning a lot about the Constitutional Convention. We have been focusing on the topic of representation and what all the ideas based around representation were. On the 12th, or yesterday, we were divided into groups to focus on one of the 3 questions of representation. My question was the question of election by the people or election by state legislatres. What surprised me was how many of the people opposed the election by the people. Roger Sherman, Elbride Gerry, Charles Pinkney, and Oliver Ellsworth all opposed election by the people. I would've thought that most of the men involved would be for election by the people as they were already governed by one force and didn't have a say. Most of their opposition came from their ideas that people are easily influenced to vote one way or another, which I really understand. The other three men all supported the election by the people, mainly for the reasons as that was what democracy was and that a government couldn't really be strong without the support and confidence of the people which they would get by letting the people vote. The next day, or today rather, our groups got split up and we had to explain our question of representation to people who had different questions of representation. The other two questions that we learned about were if there should be one branch of government or two branches and if there should be proportional or equal representation in congress. I found the question of proportional or equal representation to be really interesting. I think that it would be more fair to have more representatives for the larger states but then the smaller states would be easily out voted by the larger states. I found it really interesting how all these ideas were piled together to create the House of Representatives and the Senate and how all the ideas of representation are divided up to be a well organized branch of government.