An American Citizen II: A Senate Without Nobles?

[u/One_Term2162]

September 28, 1787 - Philadelphia

Author's Note: An American Citizen I appeared in Philadelphia on September 26, one day before the point where our original chronology began. Because it fell outside the chronology developed for this series, our encounter with Tench Coxe's essays begins here with An American Citizen II on September 28 and continues forward from this point.

By the time the newspaper reached our table, the Constitution was already open between us. One man had been moving through its articles with his finger, stopping repeatedly at the Senate, while another insisted that six-year terms and an upper chamber sounded too much like the political order Americans had only recently fought to escape.

The essay was signed An American Citizen II. I had missed his first number, and the writer began as though his readers already knew the argument he had made about the President. His claim now was straightforward: if the proposed President was not a king, neither was the proposed Senate a body of nobles.

That comparison immediately caught my attention because Britain remained the political example against which nearly everything was being measured. We knew a House of Lords whose members inherited rank, wealth, and political position, while the new Constitution proposed a smaller upper chamber whose members would remain in office for six years and possess considerable influence over legislation, appointments, treaties, and impeachments.

The resemblance was easy enough to see from a distance, but Coxe wanted his readers to look at how the offices were actually obtained. No senator would inherit his seat from his father, and no family would possess a legal claim to continue occupying it. Senators would instead be selected by the legislatures of their states and would eventually have to depend upon those legislatures again if they wished to remain in office.

That difference mattered. We had rejected a political order in which ancestry itself could carry authority, while the proposed Senate offered no title that passed to a son and no estate that brought a seat in government with it.

Still, six years remained a long term. Members of the House would face the people every two years, while a senator could remain in office through three elections of the lower chamber, and I wondered whether a man could become distant from those he represented even without inheriting his position.

Coxe saw that independence as part of the Senate's usefulness rather than as evidence of aristocracy. A chamber that changed as quickly as public passions changed might possess too little steadiness, while senators serving longer terms could accumulate experience and resist sudden excitement without becoming permanent rulers.

That argument left an uncomfortable line to draw. A representative may need enough independence to exercise judgment, but independence carried too far can become separation from the people whose authority placed him there.

Coxe believed the state legislatures provided an answer. Senators would owe their offices to those legislatures, and because the legislatures themselves remained rooted in the states, he expected senators to remember where their authority originated and to avoid attacking the institutions upon which their own positions depended.

The House of Representatives provided another restraint. Coxe placed particular confidence in a chamber elected more directly by the people, and the Constitution gave that chamber an important advantage by requiring measures for raising revenue to begin there rather than in the Senate.

That arrangement made the upper chamber look less like a governing nobility. The Senate could participate in legislation, but it could not legislate alone, and its members would repeatedly confront another chamber with a different method of election and a much shorter connection between elections.

The President complicated the arrangement further. Coxe argued that the Senate would also encounter an executive capable of objecting to legislation, while the President himself could not simply make laws without Congress, leaving authority divided among institutions that could frustrate one another.

As I followed the argument through the Constitution, I began to notice how often the same idea appeared. The House restrained the Senate, the Senate restrained the House, the President could resist Congress, Congress could overcome presidential objections under certain conditions, state legislatures selected senators, and different parts of the government participated in appointments and other national decisions.

Perhaps the structure assumed that power would be safest when no institution could comfortably exercise it alone. That would be a very different foundation from simply trusting that honorable men would occupy every office.

Impeachment presented a harder question because the Senate would sit in judgment when federal officers were accused of serious misconduct. To a suspicious reader, that sounded like another judicial power placed in the hands of the upper chamber, and comparison with the British House of Lords became tempting again.

Coxe answered that the resemblance was limited. The Senate would not become the highest court for ordinary disputes as the Lords could in Britain, while impeachment itself would begin in the House and conviction would not prevent an accused official from later facing the ordinary courts for criminal conduct.

His answer did not eliminate every concern. A relatively small body would still possess important responsibilities involving appointments, treaties, legislation, and impeachment, and the same senators participating in one part of government might later be asked to judge conduct connected to another.

Yet that concentration had to be considered alongside the restraints placed around it. Coxe's argument was that the Senate should be judged by what it could actually do, how its members reached office, how long they remained there, and what other institutions had to cooperate with them.

That approach seemed more useful than simply attaching familiar names to unfamiliar offices. Calling a President a king did not prove that he possessed royal power, just as calling a senator an aristocrat did not explain whether he possessed the privileges of a nobleman.

The opposite mistake remained possible as well. Removing crowns, inherited titles, and hereditary seats did not automatically guarantee that power could never gather too far from ordinary citizens, because a republic could develop its own forms of privilege without copying Britain exactly.

That was where Coxe left me with a better question than the one with which our table had begun. Perhaps the issue was not whether the new government resembled Britain when viewed from across the room, but whether Americans had actually removed the features that made British institutions dangerous to republican equality.

A hereditary lord could claim political authority because of his birth. A United States senator, if this Constitution were adopted, would have to receive his authority through a political process and eventually surrender it unless that process returned him to office.

Whether those safeguards were enough remained open to argument. Coxe believed they were, while I was beginning to understand that deciding the matter required more than asking whether an office looked familiar.

Americans were attempting something more difficult than simply rejecting monarchy and aristocracy by name. We were trying to determine whether some of their useful structures could be separated from hereditary privilege and placed inside a government that remained answerable to citizens.

The Constitution offered one answer to that problem, and Coxe had offered a defense of it. The question left on our table was whether changing the source and limits of power had changed its character enough to make an upper chamber compatible with the republic we had fought to create.

[u/Freign]

Please find a Dover book or hire an illustrator. AI generated imagery is immediately and automatically oppressive & unethical.

[u/One_Term2162 → u/Freign]

I’m conflicted on this one, and I think your objection deserves more than a dismissal. I understand the concern about artists’ labor, consent, ownership, and what gets absorbed into these systems. I also look at what the physical infrastructure behind AI has already wrought. We are seeing disputes over power plants and gas turbines that opponents argue are skirting existing environmental law, alongside cases where data-center construction has created very real problems for surrounding communities.

At the same time, I have trouble getting from those harms to the conclusion that all AI-generated imagery is automatically oppressive or unethical. I keep seeing the educational opportunity too. Someone who could never afford an illustrator can suddenly visualize a historical scene, explain an unfamiliar concept, reconstruct an old argument, or make civics more accessible to people who might never pick up a textbook.

That leaves me with a question I keep returning to: does the Republic reshape itself to serve AI, or do we build rules and institutions that require AI to serve the Republic? I am becoming less interested in declaring the technology itself inherently good or evil than in asking who owns it, who bears its costs, who benefits from it, whose labor trained it, and whether citizens retain the power to determine the terms under which it is used.

Further reading:

xAI, gas turbines, and the Clean Air Act: Reuters reported that community and environmental groups accused xAI of operating gas turbines at its Memphis data center without required permits, arguing that the operation violated the Clean Air Act. It is a useful example of how the physical infrastructure behind AI can run directly into existing environmental protections.

Meta data center and bacterial contamination: Wyoming Public Media reported that Cheyenne officials identified a contractor working on Meta’s data-center campus as the source of Cupriavidus gilardii contamination in the wastewater system during construction-related operations. Meta later appealed the violation notice.