The VA & NJ Plans Aren’t the Whole Story | Dr. Nicholas Cole | BRI’s Constitutional Conversations

0:00 yeah I think we wanted to take seriously the thing that the framers themselves the founders themselves were most proud of which was the the Constitution had come out of a rational process of debate that was serious and formal and involved iterative discussions of language over

0:21 the course of a long period of time and that that that was a much more rational way of designing a constitution than asking a very wise man to go into a room and write a constitution for them which is what you know the ancient Greeks had done or or other states had done and the Federalist Papers right at the very beginning of the document reflects on

0:44 how remarkable it is that America will be governed through reflection and choice and what they’re really referring to is the fact that this wasn’t just the creation of one or two individuals it was a compromise reached with great difficulty and sometimes some very heated debate and by a group of people

1:07 who had very different perspectives on on how America should be governed and we really wanted to take that idea seriously and help lay it out for people so that we can better understand really what compromise meant at the end of the 18th century how did those compromises shape the convention well I suppose that

1:31 you know one that one thing to say is that the the typical way that the Constitution is sometimes taught is by giving students the Virginia Plan and giving students the New Jersey plan and asking them you know to find a compromise between the two positions and

1:53 that’s often how this is taught and you can get a bright group of sixteen year olds to work for about forty-five minutes and they’ll come up with something that looks a bit like splitting the difference between the Virginia Plan and the New Jersey Plan and then you have to ask well what was the convention doing for the rest

2:13 the three months you know if that’s if that’s all it takes splitting the difference between these two plans then then what were they really up to and as we work through the records and built a model of them what we really showed was actually the the process was so much more formal than

2:36 that but also so much more focused on iterative improvements of the Virginia Plan in different ways rather than trying to split the difference between the Virginia and the New Jersey Plan so the the Virginia plan is is tabled for debate first it receives debate in the committee of the whole for several weeks

2:56 that’s all of the members of the convention working together but with slightly less formal rules of debate their revision of the Virginia plan is complete they never really do a revision of the New Jersey plan they then reconvene as the full plenary session of the convention and they do the whole

3:17 thing over again and then that document is passed to the committee of detail which further refines the plan that plan is then debated further and refined then it goes to the committee of style which is the point at which it really begins to look like a piece of legislation that

3:39 plan is then further debated and revised and then the final Constitution is adopted so to teach this as the convention split the difference between the Virginia and the New Jersey Plan um really doesn’t capture the nature of that process at all in fact the the New Jersey delegation makes relatively few

4:01 contributions during the formal sessions of the convention of course we know behind the scenes they may have been talking to people all the time but as far as the the the formal process of debate goes presenting this as a battle between these two delegations just doesn’t capture the the work of the convention and we’re very excited to

4:21 find different ways to lay this out for people and different ways to help them or how that whole process worked but it’s much more a meeting of people who are used to writing legislation and used to the processes of writing legislation than it is a meeting of philosophers

4:42 debating abstract philosophical ideas and very quickly the convention restricts itself to always debating in some way or other written proposals for specific language this is this is not a meeting of philosophers debating very very abstract points that’s just not how

5:04 they did their work