Section 1 states, "All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."

The framers of the Constitution were well aware that movement toward popular sovereignty in England consisted of Parliament obtaining the "power of the purse," control over government spending, from the Crown.  The framers went one step further in powers they gave to Congress, giving the power to declare war solely to Congress, but that’s getting ahead of the story.

The central idea of the government came from the Declaration of Independence, that government rests on the "consent of the governed."  But the heritage was much older than that.  In November, 1620, all 41 adult males who had come over on the Mayflower, signed a compact in which they, "combined ourselves together into a civil Body Politick,... And ... to enact, constitute, and frame, such just and equal Laws, Ordinances, Acts, Constitutions and Offices, from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and convenient for the General good of the Colony..."

This was the first written statement of government by popular will on American soil.  Perhaps the best known is the slogan of the American Revolution, "No taxation without representation."  Certainly the most elegant statement is Abraham Lincoln’s from the Gettysburg Address: "Government of the people, by the people and for the people...."  In short, the first order of business had to be the creation of a Congress.

Our Congress is not divided into two houses with different criteria for election/selection because England has two houses, the Lords and the Commons.  Instead, this odd arrangement, which appears in relatively few nations, is born of the difficulty of reaching agreement on any government, in Philadelphia.

Our original, failed government was the Articles of Confederation.  In it, each state had equal representation.  Each sent three to seven congressmen, but they collectively cast only one vote.  Yet, at that time one state, Virginia, had one-third of all residents.  Virginia and the other large states thought Congress should be based on population.

This fight between the small states that wanted each to have an equal vote, and the large states that wanted a population base, nearly caused the collapse of the Philadelphia Convention.  Delegate Bedford Gunning of Delaware suggested darkly that "other nations may take us by the hand" if the small states did not get their way.  Ultimately, the Grand Compromise was struck that the states would have equal representation in the Senate, and proportional representation in the House.

In designing their new government, the framers were well aware of the successes and failures of the few republics that had been created in history.  They were well aware of direct democracy, in which the citizens voted in person on public issues.  This was the pattern from Athens, which had been followed successfully by hundreds of jurisdictions in New England governed by town meetings.  But given the limits on travel and communications of the day, they deemed direct democracy both wrong and impractical for the United States.

The framers faced two daunting challenges in the design of the Congress.  One was to create a durable balance between the new federal government and the long-existing state governments. The other was to make the federal government itself durable, more durable by far than any other republic.

There are, today, problems with the federal-state balance, and also with our long term survival.  Still, history has entered a verdict of success.  The government of the United States under its Constitution as amended, has survived longer than any other government under any other written constitution in history.

All but six of the world’s nations have written constitutions.  France and Poland were the first two written constitutions after ours.  Hundreds of constitutions have been written, put into place, and failed, since the U.S. Constitution went into effect with ten states participating in the election of President George Washington.  The reasons for the failures of the others and the success of ours, are found in the designs of those documents.