Why did the framers of the constitution feel it necessary to have a legislature composed of two houses?

Answer 1

Because they wanted one house (the House of Representatives) to represent the people and the other house (the Senate) to represent the states. Originally, each state legislature chose the method by which Senators were elected, and they usually chose to give themselves that power. So, in most states, the state legislatures, as "the state", chose the US Senators for that State. But then the Seventeenth Amendment (ratified 1913) nullified this by specifying that the people will elect Senators.

So, really, there's no longer any point to having two houses anymore, because both of them now represent the people and neither of them represents the states. For that matter, there's no point in having a Constitution anymore, since the original intent of the document has been so thoroughly thwarted by this and other amendments, and even Supreme Court decisions, that it is now completely meaningless.

Answer 2

Bicameral legislatures have been around for thousands of years. Most recently for the Founders was the British House of Lords and House of Commons. Bicameral gives equal standing to state representatives in the Senate; and gives proportional standing to them in the House.

Thus there is a balance in creating laws: The smaller states have an equal opportunity to influence the process as the larger states in the Senate. The larger states have a larger influence on the process in the House. Then both bodies have to compromise on differences in the laws they create together. No tyranny of the minority by the majority.

Answer 3

Our bi-cameral legislature is a result of a compromise between those who believed each state should have an equal say and those who believed each legislator should represent an equal number of people. In the US Senate, each state has two senators and therefore an equal vote, regardless of population. California and Vermont each have two senators, even though California's population is many times greater. The number of Representatives in the US House, however, are determined based on populations, with each member representing a district of approximately 700,000 people. California has 53 Representatives in the House, Vermont only one.

Answer 4

The idea behind a bicameral legislature (called the "Virginia Compromise") instead of a unicameral legislature was to balance the representation of various groups.

The House of Representatives is directly elected by the people, so it represents the people, and each state gets a number of representatives based on its population. It is also elected every 2 years, and the whole House is reelected at once, so it is a dynamic body that is highly responsive to the whims of the public.

By contrast, the Senate was originally elected by the state legislatures, so it was intended to represent the interests of the states. Even now with senators directly elected by the people, it still does that--in part because each state, no matter its size, gets 2 senators, so small states are more influential in the Senate than they are in the House. Also, senators are elected every 6 years (and only one third of the Senate is up for election at any time), so it is a less volatile body that changes more slowly, and is meant to be more deliberative and cautious than the House.

Working together, the two bodies balance each other out, generally resulting in relatively balanced legislative work--and a largely centrist ideology.

Answer 5

The founding fathers realized that a government without checks and balances is often a corrupt or tyrannical one. Thus, they implemented several checks and balances into the structure of the federal government. The most obvious is the division of the judicial, legislative, and executive branches. However, the legislative branch is divided to ensure popular representative democracy in the House of Representatives (where the number of members a particular state sends is due to its population) and representation of states rights by issuing two senators from each state to the Senate.

It was a compromise between those from populous states and those from lightly populated states. In the House the numbers of Representatives is determined by population, in the Senate it is the same for every state, 2. This way big states will not bully smaller states.

Answer 6

A bicameral legislative body was created to assuage the Southern states who were suspicious of the Northern states and felt it unfair that apportionment be the order of a House of Representatives since the Northern states were more populated than the Southern states. Thus a bicameral legislative body was proposed where there would be a House of Representatives elected by apportionment and a Senate where each state would elect two Senators. This in itself did not appease the South so a further compromise was hammered out which has become known as the three fifths compromise. This compromise allowed slave states, which were mostly Southern states, to count each slave they owned as three fifths of a person. This remarkable bone headed compromise has forever tainted that great document known as the Constitution of the United States of America. It took the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment and a Civil War to undo the stupidity of that move. Many historians will argue that the economy was so tied into slavery at that time that abolishing slaver as a term of statehood would have prevented the United States from effectively forming and that the Southern states might have allied with England to destroy any hopes for freedom at all. Of course, telling a bunch of slaves that they are not really people and just three fifths of a person just so a bunch of white guys can be free is fairly disingenuous. Also, given a Civil War ensued to correct the problem only undermines any argument that the compromise was necessary to keep a union together.

Answer 7

The framers of the Constitution felt it necessary to have a bicameral legislature because they believed that all states should have the same amount of people to represent them no matter what the state's population was. However, at the same time, they also felt that a state with more people should have more people to represent them. The bicameral legislature was a compromise between those states that wanted equal say and those states that wanted population to determine how much say a state got in government.

Answer 8

Simply put, the framers did not want any part of the government to be all powerful, the bicameral legislature was created because the framers believed that they would act as a check and balance on each other.

Answer 9

Because the had a vision of the future, a future full of ONE DIRECTION fans and they new ONE DIRECTION and all the DIRECTIONERS will rule the world