The Constitution of the United States of America was a document that contained many compromises the balanced political idealism with political expediency. Political idealism is the set of beliefs that the Constitutionalists ultimately wanted to achieve in the new government. Political expediency limited and put off certain political ideals in order to achieve agreement between the states on a central government, quickly enact the new government, and to avoid controversial topics until a later time. This caused a battle with ideals and realism in forming a new government.

When the Constitutionalists met in Philadelphia in 1787 many representatives had different ideas on how the new government should be structured, the powers allotted to the central government, and how much political power should be given to common citizens. One Constitutionalist, James Madison, believed in a strong central government with a lower house elected by the people that in turn elected an upper house that elected the executive branch. The amount of representatives given to each state would depend on the population of the state. Madison's Virginia Plan would separate the national go

Another point of contention between political ideals was the involvement of the ordinary citizens in the election of the executive branch. Hamilton's ideal of little involvement by the common citizen and the Anti-Federalists ideal of involvement in the political process of citizens was compromised with the creation of the Electoral College. Through the Electoral College people had direct democratic control over the electors who had control over the election of the president. This helped in the actual election of a president by avoiding the counting of the national populations' votes instead of only a limited number of votes by electors. This increased the expediency in which elections could take place.

Another compromise of political ideals was counting of slaves in the population. The south wanted to have slaves counted in the population in order to increase the power of the southern states in the national government. Meanwhile, slaves would not be taxed as property. The north, which had few slaves in comparison to the south, wished to maintain it's power in the house determined by population by not counting slaves in the census but taxing them. This battle over the ideals of slavery was brought to an end with the Three-Fifths Compromise, wh

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Approximate Word count = 851
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)