Democracy in the US Constitution: Representation and the Balance of Powers

Extraits

[...] Returning to our definition of a democracy, it is evident that the United States' Constitution is highly undemocratic in both its proportion of representation and in its unequal allocation of political rights to the privileged elite. The Framers of the Constitution certainly intended to protect minorities from a majority rule, but the minorities they chose to protect were simply based on self-interests instead of democratically justified merit. Any subsequent minorities that gained protection as a result of this process did so inadvertently, and often they had to gain such protection through a system of amendments that was centered on an illogically disproportionate representative body. [...]

[...] Certainly it is important to defend the sheep from the three wolves, however, the Framers' in effect did not protect minorities who were in danger they protected minorities who already held power. The disproportionate representation of the Senate and Electoral College heavily favored the small states and the slave states, which for the most part were comprised of wealthy, white landowners. By protecting the slave states, the Constitution only took rights away from the weak minority that was the African-American race. Slavery, which entirely exemplifies the struggle of the oppressed sheep versus its domineering wolves, was entirely permissible under the Constitution because of the protection of strong minorities. [...]

[...] Valeo, the First Amendment was “impermissibly infringed by the limits placed by the Federal Election Campaign Act on the amounts that candidates for federal office or their supporters might spend to promote their election” (151). Thus, the Constitution inherently grants greater rights to those who have greater resources, which once again is comprised of an elite minority. This particular disparity in power weakens the voice of both the majority and all economically weak minorities, further discounting the seemingly noble sentiment of the prompt. [...]

[...] Senate and the Electoral College became bodies of disproportionate representation for reasons not based on ideological calculus, but rather for the sake of arbitrary means of compromise. Furthermore, the fact that constitutional amendments must receive a two-thirds majority from the Senate followed by approval by the legislatures in three-fourths of the states accentuates the imbalance of power in the United States government. Based on this fact, Dahl illustrates that an amendment could be vetoed by “thirty-four senators from the seventeen smallest states with a total population of 20,495,878” (161). That constitutes a mere of the U.S. [...]

[...] To begin with, when assessing the degree to which the Constitution upheld democratic principles, it is first and foremost necessary to understand what is meant by democracy. Political scientist Goran Therborn offers a useful definition of democracy as a “representative government elected by an electorate consisting of the entire adult population whose voices carry equal weight and who are allowed to vote with any opinion without intimidation from any external force.” When discussing the Constitution's ability to check the rule of the majority, the most pertinent element of this definition is that each voter's voice carries equal weight, and therefore the political system is not biased towards any group or peoples. [...]