[jfengel]

I think just the fact that it was the first thing on offer that wasn't the thing they were already using.

There are better alternatives, and if legislatures were designed to come up with optimal solutions, we'd probably have use one of them. Instead we have inertia, because the Sainted Holy Founders thought inertia was good for a country, so they optimized legislative branches to be useless.

[xethos]

This is entirely unrelated to your point, but as you brought up the sanctity some Americans hold their founding fathers to:

How do some assume the American founding fathers thought ahead, and had it all planned out, with good solutions (instead of merely solutions),

...while also being aware of the Flynn effect?