I understand what you are saying. Still to me, it seems like government tries to do way too much. And I'm not so sure that eliminating needless, unconstitutional departments and replacing them with more Representatives would work to reduce the size of government.

Personally I think there are too many mountains made from molehills. Every time something goes slightly wrong people look to government for solutions and our reps are all too happy to help, of course for re-election votes. If our Federal government spent less time creating new "national (love your whatever) day" and stuck to only the most critical issues while insuring that what they do meets constitutional muster, we would have a much smaller, less intrusive government. I also believe this to be true at all levels of government.

Your subject title here contradicts the subject title there. I fail to see how the 12th Amendment opened the door to tyranny. I do think that it would be more interesting to have the President and Vice President come from different competing political parties. We might have had more assassinations, though, and that can only be destabilizing. So, the 12th Amendment seems to have been a good technical fix that admitted to the reality of political parties.

Also, granted that the exact language of the Constitution allows the states to choose electors any way they want, it is not clear how the present system of picking them as a whole group by party would have been avoided.

Any way you arrange it, an elector can run as an individual by pledging to vote for some candidate or for any candidate chosen by some party.

Moreover, it is at the state level that the ballots are created and distributed. Ideally, the President and Vice President would not be on the ballot at all, only the names of electors. But that has nothing to do with the 12th Amendment. If anything, it is a flaw in allowing states to control the election process. But I see no way around that.

Not a hint. A direct implication.

The House is intended to be the portion of Fed Gov't closest to the people subject to the most intent and most often scrutiny with elections each two (2) yrs. It's impossible for him to know the interest of the approx 275,000 people he supposedly represents. As to work load, one of the arguments for the Regulatory regime we have is that the House can't devote enough time to their oversight responsibilities. True, they're doing more than the Constitution intended, but it's a lot easier to convince 30,000 that 'somethings rotten in Denmark' than it is 275,000 growing each Census.

That's an interesting point about the number of Representatives. Do you think that the true workload has increased for Representatives given the explosion of bureaucracies also to take care of what had been legislative functions? Would increasing the size of the House alleviate some of the problems you see?

I can see an outgrowth you might be hinting at as well - the tendency as a represented population gets larger while the number of delegates remains constant that the individual delegates would tend toward tyranny as well just based on the population base. It's like creating fiefdoms - especially among the low-information and welfare voters.

Really think we need more Representatives?? Seems to me that if they just stuck to upholding the Constitution they would have much less to do and we could go back to a part time Congress at a much lower wage. Just saying.

It's not only the 12th and 17th and the machinations against the Electoral College, it's also the House's manipulation of the representation per population. Instead of the 30,000 or so voters for each Representative at the founding, the House during the same time as the 17th, locked in the total # of Representatives at the current 435, so now each Representative/voters is at about 275,000.

I can see that it's difficult enough to represent 30,000---but 275,000, no way. It's as well a large part of the problem the House has in budget and expenditure control and in oversight. They simply don't have enough Representatives to manage the work required of them.