Day 3 Class Post

Friday in class we went over the syllabus and our upcoming assignments to eliminate confusion and prevent us from being angry with Mr. Boyle.  His plan worked, and (as far as I know) no one has any harsh feelings towards him.  Good for you, Mr. Boyle.  Anyway,  We're all clear on our assignments now.

Today in class we worked in groups to answer questions about different plans for the executive branch of our government.  The plans we went over were the Virginia Plan, the New Jersey Plan, and the Hamilton Plan.  Reading all of the different ideas brings up the question of whether our system is the best or if something else would be better.  When I think about this, I like to focus on the Hamilton Plan.  The plans all had their similarities and differences, but the one with the most striking differences was the Hamilton Plan.  It was rather similar to a monarchy, in fact.  The leader would continue to lead so long as he was doing a good job.  Now that's an interesting idea.  It makes sense because a good leader is good for a country, right?  But then again, aren't new people with new ideas good for it as well?  I feel that the answer to both of those questions is yes.  So would it be better to have a set number of years or unlimited?  With a set number of years, you might end up with a great leader who cant continue.  If the term is unlimited, that leader can just keep leading.  That seems like it could be a good thing, but then again new ideas can always be beneficial to the government.  There is also the issue of a bad leader.  Who's to say that a bad leader will give up power when you tell him to?  If you have someone to oversee him and stop his shenanigans then that hopefully wont be too big of an issue.  The concern is still there though.  Unlimited terms definitely have a few issues.  I was thinking of a way that we could combine the two and thought "hey, why don't we have an option to keep a good leader longer, but not indefinitely?"  Then I felt really silly because that's what a second term is for.  Our system kind of does combine the two types of systems.  We can keep a good leader if we want to, but instead of keeping them indefinitely we just give them a little more time.  Then they have to step down.  It's nice because it allows to have good leaders for a while and new people and ideas.  In the three plans that we went over, none of them allowed for re-election.  I wonder why that is.  Could they have assumed that they wouldn't have leaders they wanted to keep? Probably not.  They seemed to have high hopes for their lovely new country.  Maybe they felt that they would need new ideas coming in.  Or maybe it was so everyone gets the same amount of time to be president so it was fair.  Or maybe they were afraid to have a ruler for too long.  That could come from having a king for so long.  Many people wanted to get as far away from a monarchy as possible, so they could have wanted shorter terms to allow for the maximum input from the people.  Regardless of their reasons, it's really interesting how they came up with all these different ideas and managed to decide on one system that seems to work rather nicely.