HKB
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Often appears with: unicameral legislature powers · popular ratification · political legitimacy and consent · government as trust · forms of government · delegated authority and treaty legitimacy · counsel and advisers to rulers · constitutions and founding law · consent of the people · conquest, plunder, and captives · congress as deputation · articles of confederation
Usually: argument (2) · the fall of the great (1) · censure (1) · detachment (1) · exhortation (1)
“Government is not a trade which any man, or any body of men, has a right to set up and exercise for his own emolument, but is altogether a trust, in right of those by whom that trust is delegated, and by whom it is always resumeable.” Thomas Paine, The Writings of Thomas Paine — Volume 2 (1779-1792): · insight
Hamilton says Congress’s one-body design is improper, the Confederation lacked popular ratification, and true legitimacy must rest on the people’s consent, not state legislatures’ delegated authority.
of preconceived opinions, that it is a system so radically vicious and unsound, as to admit not of amendment but by an entire change in its leading features and characters. The organization of Congress is itself utterly improper for the exercise of those powers which are necessary to be deposited in the Union. A single assembly may be a proper receptacle of those slender, or rather fettered, authorities, which have …
He contrasts early U.S. Congress as a non-compulsory deputation with the principle of defining congressional authority after independence, arguing government is a trust of duties not rights.
is lost, government is but a child in power; and though, like the old government in France, it may harass individuals for a while, it but facilitates its own fall. After the declaration of independence, it became consistent with the principle on which representative government is founded, that the authority of congress should be defined and established. Whether that authority should be more or less than congress the…