미합중국헌법상 입법부 구성방식의 역사적 기원 : ‘대타협(The Great Compromise)’의 입헌 경위를 중심으로

초록

The Connecticut(Great) Compromise of the Federal Convention on July 16, 1787, which defined the fundamental structure of the U.S. Congress, was beyond doubt the core part in the early history of the development of the U.S. Constitution. In this paper, I traced the origins of the federal legislative branch back to the constitutional debates of 1787, and found some significant features. The popularly elected state legislatures of the mid-1780s, under over-democratic state constitutions drafted in the mid-1770s, were too keenly responsive to popular pressures, but the Confederation Congress under the Articles of Confederation of 1781 was powerless to solve the problem of the U.S. political system at that time. This was why the delegates desired to arrest the trend toward democracy fueled by the state constitutions, to control the regional interests pursued by the state legislatures, and to set up the “new” representative national legislature in the constitutional debates surrounding the legislative branch. The issue of how to apportion representation in the national legislature dominated the Federal Convention for over a month, and after repeated debates and votes, both the large and small states reconciled conflicting regional interests and reached a final compromise: “Each state would have the same number of senators, and the House would be apportioned according to a ratio of no more than one representative for every forty thousand inhabitants, counting only three-fifth of the slaves.” During the political process of debate, negotiation, and compromise in the Federal Convention, the collective interests of the small/large states were a crucial factor but the personal interests of the delegates themselves also played a meaningful role. In designing the national legislature the delegates used the people to overcome the state dominance of political life without giving to the people the sort of control over the new government. This was why The Connecticut(Great) Compromise, despite its far-reaching impact on the whole U.S. Constitution, was only a half-great “under-democratic” success.

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