AMERICAN GOVERNMENT EXAM

The Founders were full-time politicians who lived, breathed, and ate politics and government. They were career politicians. Had they not, they could not have accomplished what they did. The only term limitation in the American government was that established by George Washington, who declined to run for a third term - to which he would have been overwhelmingly re-elected - and in so doing established a tradition that was not broken until Franklin Roosevelt ran for a third term as President in 1940.

Until the Civil War, the United States government was dominated by men who had first come to Congress in 1812. Henry Clay, who held off the Civil War for more than forty years died in office in 1850; John Quincy Adams ran for the House of Representatives and served for over seventeen years after being President. "Professional politicians" have led us from the first.

Reformers generally want to limit terms to three two-year terms for the House of Representatives and two six-year terms for the Senat

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esident so beholden might permit the States to erode federal authority and undermine the whole idea of a federation. A direct popular vote was presented and rejected, because they feared that without sufficient information about candidates from outside their State, people would vote for a "favorite son." At worst, no president would emerge with a popular majority sufficient to govern the whole country; at best, the choice would be decided by the large States, with no regard for the small ones (Hoffman, 1996, 941). The last choice was indirect election of the president through a College of Electors. The most knowledgeable and informed individuals from each State would select the president based solely on merit, with no regard to State of origin or political party (Best 47). In the first design of the Electoral College, described in Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution, each State was allocated a number of Electors equal to the number of its U.S. Senators plus the number of its U.S. Representatives. This satisfied both large and small States. The manner of choosing the Electors was left to the State legislatures, pacifying States suspicious of a central government. Members of Congress and employees of the federal government
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Electoral College, Founding Fathers, House Representatives, Court Proponents, State's Electors, Hayes Congress, Andrew Jackson, TERM LIMITS, II Section, Grover Cleveland, electoral college, term limits, popular vote, house representatives, electoral votes, absolute majority, political parties, vice president, john quincy adams, electoral vote, quincy adams, abolish electoral college, president house representatives, house representatives choose, third party movements,
Approximate Word count = 2539
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)

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