How Congress Lost, Part II: The Constitutional Presidency

Key Points An examination of presidential dominance in our contemporary government requires an understanding of the more limited role the framers envisioned the president having under the Constitution. The framers were primarily committed to an independent executive with the power to enforce the laws and act as a check on Congress. To these ends, they empowered the presidential office with a legislative veto and established the Electoral College, a system to choose the president independent of Congress. The framers rejected more elaborate mechanisms to empower the president, as proposed variously by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (among others). Read the full pdf. The American presidency has come to dominate Congress and the political process in ways that the framers of the Constitution never anticipated. The reports in this series seek to explain how this has happened. To begin that process, it is important to understand exactly what the framers thought the president should do and how he should go about it. That is the focus of this report. Americans had bad experiences with executive government in the lead-up to the American Revolution. It was not simply the king who behaved in a high-handed manner; it was also his agents in the colonies—namely, the royal governors. While the royal governors had for generations governed harmoniously with colonial legislatures, tensions emerged after the Seven Years’ War ended. As the British government imposed greater burdens on the colonies, it was often the colonial governors at the sharp end of the proverbial stick, enforcing those dictates. Accordingly, after the colonists declared their independence, they were at pains to sharply reduce executive power. State legislatures strictly curtailed governors’ authority, and the national government under the Articles of Confederation did not have an executive branch at all. The results were disastrous. If the prerevolutionary era was a kind of monarchical despotism, the postrevolutionary era was close to a legislative tyranny. In James Madison’s view, the laws—particularly at the state level—were so unjust that “it brings more into question the fundamental principle of republican government, that the majority who rule in such Governments, are the safest Guardians both of public Good and of private rights.” 1 The Constitution was, at its core, an attempt to right these many wrongs. And doing that, as far as the framers were concerned, required a president—a single person whose main tasks were to enforce the laws of the nation, protect the people from foreign and domestic threats, and serve as an independent check on legislative overreach. To accomplish these goals, the framers were careful to give the president the power to monitor Congress through the veto. They were also intent on giving him an independent will to do so. The Electoral College is, to our 21st-century eyes, an archaic holdover from a long-gone era, but the framers intended it as an alternative institution to congressional selection of the president. In the main, this satisfied most delegates—although not everybody. Madison and Alexander Hamilton were counted among those who still had concerns. Hamilton thought it prudent to endow the president with patronage powers to manage the legislature. Madison did not support this idea, but he sought to strengthen the presidential veto power by joining it to the judiciary in what he called a “council of revision.” 2 This, he believed, would give the president more heft in fights against Congress, which Madison expected to preponderate in a republican system. While neither Madison nor Hamilton won these measures, their efforts were noteworthy because both framers took on crucial roles in the government during the Washington administration and sought to create through the law the reforms they thought the Constitutional Convention should have enshrined in the Constitution. Read the full report. Notes 1. James Madison, “Vices of the Political System of the United States, April 1787,” Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-09-02-0187. 2. James Madison, “The Virginia Plan,” Founders Online, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-10-02-0005.