A Brilliant Solution

My Dearest Elizabeth,

I am sorry I did not write you the day I got here like I said I would, but we dove right into the topics at hand. We first off had to discuss whom we were going to elect to be the head of the convention, and we came up with George Washington because of his wonderful leadership skills and great public speaking. We are going to establish some guidelines for the convention that for anything to be passed there must be a majority vote which I feel is going to lead to a problem down the road, first off because Rhode Island didn’t even show up, and I feel that not all of the delegates will stay through the entire convention.

The delegates of Virginia are meeting together to discuss a new form of the government, so this should be very exciting to throw our ideas at a group of such intelligent and respected men.

With love,

Edmund Randolph

My Dearest Elizabeth,

We have started to discuss “our” idea for the government and I feel that it is an amazing idea. We are still working on it but it goes as follows: There will be a bicameral legislature which I see as the best way of looking at forming a new government, because it doesn’t allow one side of the government to get too powerful because it always has the other one to keep it in check. The way that it works is that the people elect the lower house, and then the lower house then elects next house.

All of this would make the legislature very powerful and we set up some restrictions so that it cannot get any larger and out of control. We also put in a judiciary branch that has the power to veto the actions of the legislature. Well we are going to present this idea tomorrow and I will let you know how it all goes.

With love,

Edmund Randolph

My Dearest Elizabeth,

We presented our idea last month and after we had presented ours the New Jersey delegate William Paterson asked for some time off to finish his plan so we had been eagerly waiting his idea.

His plan was similar to mine but it added in that there would be a unicameral so there is room for error I think because the one house can gain too much power and there is no one that can veto bills. It also stated the present congress would remain and there would be an executive that would serve a single term. Now it seems to be a split between the two plans. The larger states are more in favor of my plan because it represents them better and makes the voting much more fair where as the smaller states feel that the New Jersey plan better represents them. We have no idea what is going to happen with the whole thing yet because of our split opinions.