Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

My point is that the Founders intended to give us a Constitutional Republic, and we barely resemble that today - even if you squint.

"A republic, if you can keep it. Our responsibility is to keep it.”

We didn't keep it very well.

The US has always had imbalances, bad behaviors, serious mistakes, calamitous times, one significant uncivil war, graft and corruption on a major scale, multiple wars and conflicts, economic disparities, contested elections, even slavery ... and yet we're still here and still doing "OK" in my view.

I wish we were better, but human nature and all that.  Trying to fix our issues is not easy.  There was a time when "party bosses" basically ran large areas of the country like dukes.

Our Founders feared a pure democracy about as much as a monarchy. 

It also wasn't feasible, so...

Court reverses Douglass Mackey's election interference conviction
Court reverses Douglass Mackey's election interference conviction

The concept of "checks and balances" is pretty astute, I don't know how else things could work well, though some other countries have of course different ways of doing things.  The concept of "innocent until proven" is another great concept.  Trial by jury, I never thought up another good way to do that.  

The Supreme Court basically cemented its ability to overturn decisions and interpret law at Marbury-v-Madison.  We owe a good but I think to John Marshall for his prudence, and juriprudence, most decisions then were 6-0.  Did you know more SCOTUS decisions in the recent term were 9-0 than any other vote?  That has been true for a while also.

The concept of a Senate is good, I think, though one can certainly argue the compromise on its structure is ... debatable.  The concept of the Electoral College has strengths, and weaknesses, like most things.  Democrats don't like it, Republicans usually do, because it favors or disfavors their strengths.  No need to get into them, the EC isn't going away, though the Compact of the States could change things without an Amendment.  Maybe.

Can you imagine California voters learning their electors voted for Trump?  Ha.

Why America's Founders Didn't Want a Democracy
Why America's Founders Didn't Want a Democracy

The role of government as [America’s founders] saw it, was to protect the rights of individuals, and the biggest threat to individual liberty was the government itself. So they designed a government with constitutionally limited powers, constrained to carry out only those activities specifically allowed by the Constitution. This book describes how the fundamental principle underlying American government has been transformed from protecting individual liberty to carrying out the will of the people, as revealed by a democratic decision-making process. (p. xxii)

Holcombe begins by laying out the case that “the Founders had no intention of creating a democracy, in the sense of a government that would be guided by popular opinion,” (p. 5) in sharp contrast to current “understanding.” And what makes the transformation from a central focus on liberty to a central focus on democracy that routinely invades liberty particularly significant is that

the powers embodied in America’s twenty-first-century democratic government are those that eighteenth-century Americans revolted against to escape. (p. 7)

Holcombe’s section on “The Elitist Constitution” is fascinating. It lays out the case for why “[t]he Constitution devised democratic processes for collective decision-making, but the Founders had no intention of designing a government that would respond to the will of the majority,” (p. 70) as illustrated by the fact that citizens “had almost no direct input into the federal government as the Constitution was originally written and ratified.” (p. 70)
The section on the Electoral College is even more striking, as it stands in sharp variance from the presumptions behind almost the entire current debate over the National Popular Vote compact:

Quote [A]t the time the Constitution was written the Founders anticipated that in most cases no candidate would receive votes from a majority of the electors. The Founders reasoned that most electors would vote for one candidate from their own states…and it would be unlikely that voting along state lines would produce any candidate with a majority of the votes. (p. 75)

Consequently,

Quote The Founders envisioned that in most cases the president would end up being chosen by the House of Representatives from the list of the top-five electoral vote recipients…Furthermore, there was no indication that the number of electoral votes received should carry any weight besides creating a list of the top five candidates