In the Constitution of the American Republic there was a deliberate and very extensive and emphatic division of governmental power for the very purpose of preventing unbridled majority rule.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
In a republic this rule ought to be observed: that the majority should not have the predominant power.
The whole basis of the Constitution was a restriction of power, and the whole basis of the federalist system was that there was not one sovereign centralized power from which all authority flows.
The United States Senate wasn't designed to be a majority-rule institution. It was designed to include and accommodate the rights of the minority in small states as well as large states.
The Constitution was about a limitation on power.
It is unnatural for a majority to rule, for a majority can seldom be organized and united for specific action, and a minority can.
The very idea of the law in a constitutional republic involves the requisite that it be a rule, a guide, uniform, fixed and equal, for all, till changed by the same high political power which made it. This is what entitles it to its sovereign weight.
Nothing can be clearer than that what the Constitution intended to guard against was the exercise by the general government of the power of directly taxing persons and property within any State through a majority made up from the other States.
How can this full, perfect, just and supreme voice of the people, embodied in the Constitution, be brought to bear, habitually and steadily, in counteracting the fatal tendency of the government to the absolute and despotic control of the numerical majority?
The whole frame of the Federal Constitution proves that the government which it creates was intended to be one of limited and specified powers.
In a democracy there is a centralization of governmental power in a simple majority.
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