The Veto of the Apportionment Act

In 1792 the Apportionment Act was proposed as a law in the United States with the purpose of fixing the size of the United States House of Representatives according to the United States Census of 1790, which recorded the population of the United States. The bill was sent to the President George Washington whom, at first couldn’t make up his mind since his advisors couldn’t get into an agreement and as a result he asked for the opinion of Edmund Randolph, Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, and Henry Knox about the bill. Randolph and Jefferson both thought the same thing, they though the bill was unconstitutional because it said, that the number of representatives, 120, should be obtained by dividing the number of the population which was established on the federal census by 30,000. To find the size of the United States House of Representatives, it was necessary that they took in consideration the option of a common divisor and the division of the population living in each state by that number, as required in the constitution (Thirty-Thousand.org). Furthermore, it that was not the only reason why they thought this bill was unconstitutional; they as well thought the bill gave an extra member in the
Amador 2 house to the states with the greatest number of people, according to Randolph. And according to Jefferson Washington should veto it since obviously the bill was unconstitutional and supposedly it brought up things that were likely to be corrupted later on in the future. Moreover, on the other hand, Knox and Hamilton support that idea that the bill was a good idea. By saying that the constitution could be misunderstood about whether the number in the house of representatives should be distributed according to the total number of habitants of the U.S. or of the population of each state, Knox agreed with the bill. After Knox sent his opinion to President Washington, Hamilton wrote to him agreeing with Knox. At the end President George Washington after looking at the opinions he received, he agreed with Jefferson and Randolph and decided to veto the bill and marked it as unconstitutional. He sent a letter to the House explaining his decision giving the two objections that Jefferson and Randolph gave to him. First he wrote that the bill did not have a right proportion to get the correct amount of numbers of the House