New Rules for a New World, Part 2 | America's Written Constitution with Akhil Reed Amar

Britain did not pay members of the House of Commons until 1911. America's Constitution paid its lawmakers from the start, and Akhil Reed Amar explains why that was a democratic reform, not a perk. This lecture reads Article I as a catalog of borrowed best practices. Amar shows the Constitution copying Pennsylvania on paid legislators and on the census, and Massachusetts on popular ratification, while imposing no property qualification and no religious test for federal office, not even in the Senate. He makes the counterintuitive case that the age minimums of 25 and 30 are egalitarian rather than restrictive, since without them states would race to send famous young sons to build seniority. He then covers two-year House terms, the public galleries that help explain the Capitol's size, and the decennial census that keeps the House in sync with a moving population. The lecture closes on the one exception to all of it: under the three-fifths clause, enslaved people counted toward a state's seats, making slaves the only form of property that bought representation. Chapters: 00:00 How big is too big 03:47 Paying lawmakers, and why it mattered 05:17 No property test, no religious test 08:22 Age minimums as an egalitarian device 11:30 Two-year terms and fixed elections 15:40 Galleries, and the people's house 17:12 The census and reapportionment 20:52 The three-fifths clause Learning objectives: After watching, you'll be able to: - Identify the state constitutions Article I borrowed its democratic features from - Explain the Federalist argument that age minimums opened rather than closed the system - Compare congressional apportionment with the rotten boroughs of the House of Commons - Distinguish the Senate's equal representation from the House of Lords' property basis - Analyze how the three-fifths clause converted enslaved people into legislative power 📺 Watch the full playlist on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCq6-l8oFuvk 🎓 Enroll on Coursera for assessments and a certificate: https://www.coursera.org/learn/written-constitution 🌐 Explore more learning opportunities on Yale Online: https://online.yale.edu/courses/americas-written-constitution