The impact of constitutional compromises on us today | US government and civics | Khan Academy

When you first learn about the Constitutional Convention in 1787 and the debates and the compromises, it's easy to assume that, okay, that's interesting from a historical point of view, but how does it affect me today? Well, the simple answer is it affects you incredibly. Those compromises that were made over 200 years ago.

So, the most obvious question is, well, what were those compromises? To even start to appreciate the compromises, let's start with this picture or this chart of the census in 1790. So, it gives a pretty good snapshot of what the United States looked like after the Constitution was ratified. As you can see, the population as a whole was much smaller than it is today. It was roughly a little under 4 million people. Today, the United States is over 300 million people.

Then, you also see a pretty big population difference between the states. You have big states like Virginia, which at the time had 750,000 people, and then you had small states like Delaware that had 60,000 people, or you have Rhode Island that has a little under 70,000 people. You can imagine the Virginians or the people from Massachusetts might have said, “Hey, we want representation in the legislative in Congress to be based on population. It should be, you know, we have a lot of people; we should get more of a say.”

While someone from, say, Delaware might say, “Wait, hold on a second. Under the Articles of Confederation, we were a sovereign state. We don't want to just become, you know, do whatever the Virginians or the people from Massachusetts want to do. We want to have a more equal say.” Of course, the big state folks would have said, “Well, no, then your population in your state are going to be overrepresented.” So, this was a serious debate, and it resulted in what is called the Great Compromise.

The Great Compromise, which is probably the most cited compromise coming out of the U.S. Constitution, is the notion of, “Okay, well, let's have it both ways in the legislative. Let's create two houses. Let's do one house that is based on population, so the House of Representatives, where Virginia will get more representation than Delaware. But then let's make another house called the Senate, where every state has equal representation, where you have two senators per state.”

To appreciate that this is all even today a controversial thing, here is an article from The New York Times from 2013. This is an article that's talking about perceived inequalities of per person federal funding, and it says, and the article is literally named, “Big State, Small State: Vermont's 625,000 residents have two United States senators, and so do New York's 19 million.” That means that a Vermonter has 30 times the voting power in the Senate of a New Yorker. Just over the state line, the biggest inequality between two adjacent states, the nation's largest gap between Wyoming and California, is more than double that.

They’re making the argument that, at least in the Senate, a person in Vermont has 30 times the representation as a person in New York. If you compare Wyoming and California, it’s a factor of 60. They say the difference reflects the growing disparity in their citizens' voting power, and it is not an anomaly. The Constitution has always given residents of states with small populations a lift. This is coming straight out of the Great Compromise, but the size and importance of the gap has grown markedly in recent decades in ways the framers probably never anticipated.

You can imagine this is The New York Times, so they probably might favor a little bit more representation for New Yorkers, but it's an interesting thing to think about. The Constitution was written over 200 years ago; could they have predicted how much the United States would be a movement to the cities? Even in that census of 1790, we saw a factor of a little more than 10 between Virginia and, say, Rhode Island. But now we're talking about a factor of 60 between California and Wyoming. There's no right answer here, but it is something very interesting to think about, and as you can see, it’s something that people are even talking about today.

Now, the other significant compromise that is also talked a lot about these days is the notion of the Electoral College. So, people who are more in the anti-federalist camp were more in favor of a participatory democracy, a direct democracy, where you have one person, one vote, and whoever gets the majority of the vote in the country, well, maybe they should be president.

But federalists, especially folks like James Madison, were a little suspicious of just the crowd voting whoever they wanted. They wanted it to go through a filter, with the idea that maybe that filter could temper the passions of the crowd, so to speak. And so, they devised this system where it isn't one person, one vote, but every state has a certain number of electors. You vote for electors, and then the states send them, and then they can place their vote for president.

It turns out that most states have decided to have a winner-take-all policy so that maybe they could matter more for the presidential election. But what that's resulted in is if you take a big state like Texas and draw a quick drawing of Texas, or a big state like California right over here in a winner-take-all, as soon as you cross 50, you get 50.1 percent in either one of the states, and in other big states, it’s true in most states.

Well then, you'll get all the electors for that state. So, even if you get 70 percent of the vote in Texas or 70 percent of the vote in California, it's equivalent to getting 50.1 percent. The reason why this has resulted in some significant debate in the recent past is you've had two major elections where the Electoral College majority was different than the popular majority. You had Bush versus Gore in 2000 and you have Trump versus Clinton in 2016.

Now, two of the other major compromises that came out of the Constitutional Convention are less debated today, and that's a good thing because they were resolved finally in 1865 by the 13th Amendment that came out of the Civil War. These were around slavery. You have the three-fifths compromise, and this is actually still more of a notion around representation even in the House.

How do you determine the population that's going to dictate how many representatives you get? What about slaves? If you look back to this chart right over here, notice some of the southern states had a significant fraction of their population that were slaves. You could imagine that their delegates were saying, “Hey, we want to count them in the population." They didn't want to count, they didn't want them to vote, but they said, “Hey, when we decide how many representatives we get, we want to count these 293,000 people in Virginia when we decide how many representatives they get.”

You can imagine other states, either just because they didn't want to dilute their own representation or maybe even some of them might have felt morally against something like slavery, said, “Well, you know, you shouldn't get a benefit because you're doing this thing called slavery.” And so they were against it. The compromise, and once again James Madison was significantly involved here, was a three-fifths compromise that for determining representation, a slave would count as three-fifths of a person, which is offensive to our sensibilities, but that's the compromise they came up with.

But it didn't become an issue anymore once slavery was abolished by the 13th Amendment. The last major compromise that people will talk about, and this one also revolves around slavery, is the importation of slaves during the Revolution. Because Great Britain had such a significant role in the slave trade, the colonies were pretty, or the states, the nascent states were pretty unified around not participating, at least with Great Britain. But once the Revolution was over, this became an issue again. Some states did not want more importation of slaves, some did.

So the compromise that was reached is that at least for 20 years, Congress would not pass a law that was prohibiting the importation of slaves. It turns out almost exactly 20 years later, once that expired from the Constitution under Thomas Jefferson, they did ban the importation of slaves officially, although it still continued to some degree at a much smaller level.

I'll leave you there, but the big appreciation here is that those debates that we talk about—the Great Compromise, the Electoral College, these debates around representation that we saw over 200 years ago—these are things that people still feel passionate about, and they still debate today.