Completing a
Final Draft
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n late
July 1787, a five member Committee of Detail was given the task of arranging
and organizing the Constitution and choosing its wording. The members of the
committee were James Wilson from Pennsylvania; John Rutledge of South Carolina,
Nathaniel Gorham of Massachusetts, Oliver Ellsworth of Connecticut, and Edmund
Randolph of Virginia.
The
committee decided that the Constitution would contain "essential
principles only; lest the operations of government should be clogged by
rendering those provisions permanent and unalterable which ought to be
accommodated to times and events." The members vowed to use "simple
and precise language" and "general propositions" rather than
intricate detail.
The
committee first prepared an outline, consolidating the convention’s decisions
by category: the legislative, the executive, and the judiciary. It gave the names to the institutions of
government: the Congress, the Supreme Court, and the President of the United States.
It listed the powers of each branch and qualifications for office.
The
committee enumerated 18 powers for Congress, from the power to tax to the power
to regulate commerce and make war. The 18th power, known as the “elastic
clause,” gave Congress the authority "to make all laws that shall be
necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers and all
other powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United
States.” The committee members also included a “supremacy clause,” which made
federal law supreme to "anything in the Constitution or laws of any state
to the contrary notwithstanding."
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hen
the committee had completed its assignment, the Convention reopened debate, and
made dozens of changes throughout the draft Constitution.
· To decrease presidential power, the
convention reduced the vote required to override a presidential veto from
three-fourths of each house to two thirds.
· To make it easier to remove a corrupt
president, the convention expanded the grounds of impeachment, adding high
crimes and misdemeanors to treason and bribery, which had been approved
earlier.
· A provision requiring Congress to call a
constitutional convention on the application of two thirds of the states was
added.
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he power
to appoint judges and ambassadors and to negotiate treaties with foreign powers
was in the hands of the Senate until the last weeks of the convention. Then the
convention decided that the president would nominate judges and ambassadors and
the Senate would have to confirm them. The executive branch would negotiate
treaties, with the advice and consent of the Senate.
In an effort to generate support for the new
plan of government, Benjamin Franklin said:
I
confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at
present approve.... [But] the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own
judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others.... I consent, sir,
to this Constitution because I expect no better, and because I am not sure that
it is not the best.
Although a number of individual delegates
refused to sign the Constitution, all the state delegations voted for the final
draft.
While
they were signing, Franklin commented about the chair on the dias in which the
Convention president had sat. Franklin said he had been studying the chair,
which had a sun painted on the headrest. He had often looked at the sun
"without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at
length I have the happiness to know that it is a rising and not a setting
sun."