Little-Acorn
Gold Member
This is a fundamentally false assumption.
The truth is, the founders designed the Constitution so that no laws would be passed unless three different groups, with three different sets of interests and loyalties, all agreed that it was needed. If even one group didn't want it, it was discarded.
The three groups were:
1.) Citizen-legislators who were loyal to their communities, and who would serve only briefly before going back to their real lives (House);
2.) Professional politicians appointed by their states whose loyalties were to see that states maintained power and the Federal government remained limited (Senate);
3.) A citizen of high character and integrity who had no legislative power but could stop laws he thought were wrong or unnecessary (President).
The reason the founders designed it that way, was because they assumed that free men pretty much didn't need laws to live and prosper. Only laws that were obvious (laws forbidding murder, assault, fraud, theft etc.; laws mandating standards for measurement, money etc.) would be passed. In all other matters, men were free to do what they wanted, and it was up to them to figure out how best to prosper and provide for themselves, their families, and their communities, as long as they didn't venture into the realm of those obvious laws.
The basic assumption the Founders made, was that laws were necessary evils that took away freedom and inhibited people from using their better judgment; and that only laws that EVERYONE thought were necessary, should be passed. Which were relatively few.
The idea of compromise, goes directly AGAINST that basic assumption, and in fact is destructive. It causes people to make laws that some of them disagree with: Laws the founders knew should NOT be imposed upon a free people.
The founders deliberately set up a government that had great difficulty in passing laws. If one group didn't like the law, it was toast.
And that's a good thing.
Only people who are willing to ignore the bad effects of laws (they override the better judgment of the people who are there on the spot and working for their families' and communities' own good), could possibly think that the kind of compromise the OP mentions is desirable. They are our chronic big-government addicts, who believe that a remote, detached, bureaucratic government can somehow make better decisions that the people directly involved who must live with the consequences of those decisions.
The obvious laws I described, produce far more benefit than harm. No compromise is needed to see that they should be passed.
Laws that require compromise, usually do more harm than good, and should NOT be passed. That's why the Founders designed such a cranky, cantankerous government,that has three ways to stop a law but only one way to pass it.
If a law is proposed that most of an entire group of legislators think are bad, we are probably better off without it.
This, of course, flies in the face of the big-govt addicts who think government is wiser than free citizens and more and more restrictions are good. They are wrong on both counts.
The "you vote for my law even if you don't like it, and I will vote for yours later even if I don't like that" attitude, is exactly what the founders wanted to avoid. And for good reason.
