The Daily Signal - Professor Explains Why Founding Fathers 'Deliberately Made Congress Weak,' Series Pt. 1

Episode Date: August 30, 2023

The Founding Fathers feared the power of the legislative branch from its inception in the late 1700s. They did not want to trade one tyrant for a group of tyrants, one professor tells "The Daily Signal Podcast," so they “deliberately made Congress weak by dividing it up into these two bodies,” the House and the Senate.  According to Joseph Postell, Hillsdale College associate professor of politics and Heritage Foundation visiting fellow, the Founders wanted the House and Senate to “fight amongst each other” because this would create a check on power. And fight they did. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) “The early politicians were really committed to their principles and were willing to fight over them,” Postell said, adding that "Duels were very common.” Postell joins "The Daily Signal Podcast" for Part One of a three-part series on how Congress really works. He discusses the history of Congress and what the Founding Fathers would say about what the legislative branch has become today.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Wednesday, August 30th. I'm Virginia Allen. Today, we are kicking off a three-part series detailing how Congress really works. You know, the longer that I have lived and worked in the Washington, D.C. area, the more I realize just how wonky Congress can be. And how so many of the things that we learn in school about how Congress works, though accurate, really fall short of pinning the way. the full picture of how our legislative branch operates on a daily basis. So we are beginning this three-part podcast series today by sitting down with Hillsdale College Associate Professor of Politics and Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Joseph Postel to talk about the founder's vision for Congress

and what they intended the powers of Congress to be and not be in the Constitution. Stay tuned for conversation with Joseph Pustell after this. The Heritage Foundation is the most effective conservative policy organization in the country. Every semester, our interns are a vital part of that mission. We pay competitively. We develop talent, and we give our interns access to some of the sharpest minds in the country. We're going on offense. So join us.

To learn more about the Young Leaders Program here at the Heritage Foundation, please go to heritage.org slash intern. It is my pleasure today to be joined by Hillsdale College Associate Professor of Politics and Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Joseph Postel. Mr. Postel, thanks so much for being with us today. That's great to be with you. Well, I'm excited because we are taking the next two days to talk about how Congress really works in truth and honesty. And in order to do that, though, we need to go back to how Congress was first intended to work, what the founders really intended. So I want to go all the way back to the 1700s first, and specifically to 1774.

That's when we had the first meeting of the Continental Congress. Just to explain what was the Continental Congress. How did some of these kind of early ideas of Congress begin to take shape in the 1700s? Sure, yeah. So the Continental Congress precedes the United States Constitution. It's, I think one of the interesting things about the Continental Congress is the word itself, Congress. So, Unlike, say, Parliament, which was the idea of a legislative body with which the framers were familiar, Congress implies something more like a bunch of different countries or different groups of people coming together to kind of hash out their differences. So they use this term Congress, even before the Constitution, right, is ratified to set up the United States Congress we have today. They used this word Congress because they really believed in a federal system.

They really believed that they were states that were united for limited purposes. purposes, but a lot of the power and the sovereignty was going to lie back with the states. So under this conception, really, it's not an entirely national system. It's actually a federal system in which, like, the Congress is almost like diplomatic representatives from different countries coming together to kind of deal with issues like trade and military defense and things like that. So you can even see from the very beginning, you know, all the way back, as you suggest, the idea of Congress as it's supposed to be people who,

come from different backgrounds, from different interests, from different groups of people, from different parts of the country. And it would be a very diverse collection of interests that might not agree on everything, but would have to somehow get along to advance the interests of the union as all. And then we move forward just a little bit on the timeline to 1789. And that marks really the first Congress, more or less, as we know it today. This is, of course, following the Revolutionary War. We have the failures. of the Articles of Confederation. And what did the founders see in that first Congress?

What did they see a need for? And what did they have in mind as they crafted that first Congress? Yeah. So, you know, the first Congress, like you say in 1789, is often referred to as the first Congress. That's sort of its official name. It makes really important decisions that have very high precedential value.

There's even one decision they make about who gets to fire the heads of departments like the Treasury and State and Ford Affairs departments. And we actually call it the decision of 1789 because it's that important. The first Congress makes these really important decisions about how the government's going to be set up, who's actually going to be in charge of various functions. But I think the deeper question here is what did the framers expect Congress to be? They really thought sought that Congress would be the centerpiece of the Republican system. You know, they they saw this new experiment in self-government,

which we would elect our own representatives, and those representatives would make the laws, and the power would really rest with that legislative body. But they didn't have a lot of clearly thought out ideas about how representatives were supposed to behave. They didn't have a lot of experience with Republican government, with popular government. It really wasn't the norm when the Constitution was ratified.

So when you read Article 1 of the Constitution, there actually isn't that much there, about what kinds of rules there should be, what kinds of debate rules, what kinds of procedural rules, what kinds of committees there should be. A lot of that was really supposed to be sketched out by experience. So what they did really believe in fundamentally was the right of the people to rule themselves through their elected representatives. And so how that was going to take place, how these different people were going to get along, how they were actually going to come to agreement on issues, that was really left to practice. And the framers learned very quickly that it was going to be

a lot more difficult to make Congress work than in theory. They really saw republics as you elect your representative. They go to the Capitol and then they make some laws. But actually, how that process plays out is very complicated. And I think the framers realized that experience was going to have to inform the kinds of structures they were going to set up to make that Congress work well. So talk a little bit more about that, if you would. What were the specific things that are laid out in the Constitution that the founder said, yes, we want this power to rest in the hands of Congress? And then what are the areas that, you know, especially those initial years that they started

to realize like, oh, this is a power that we need to ensure that Congress does have that maybe wasn't explicitly originally laid out in the Constitution? Yeah. So they think immediately that the, the thing. priorities for the early Congress, for the first Congress and a few years after that are to set up a revenue system, set up a tariff system so that you can deal with the question of raising revenue for the country. The country's in massive debt because of the Revolutionary War. So a lot of the financial issues needed to be worked out. This is why Alexander

Hamilton has become so famous, you know, is because we've now learned so much about what Alexander Hamilton was doing behind the scenes to influence Congress from his position as Secretary with the Treasury, to get the nation on a firm financial footing, to pass revenue bills that would allow for the government to raise money, to establish a national bank, which itself was highly controversial about whether Congress actually had that power or not. But to do all of these things that would kind of provide for a stable economy at the national level. So those are some of the major issues the Congress is dealing with. Congress has to figure out how to raise an army or whether even to raise an army, a navy. So national defense and sort of very high-level

economic issues about like the nation's fiscal situation. These were the real priorities of the Congress in the early years. And also I think I suppose setting up a judicial system, which really did have to be done through statute because the courts below the Supreme Court were really left to Congress to figure out how many there would be, how they'd be organized and so forth. So there's a lot for Congress to do, and Congress does it relatively well, but really the fundamental problem is chaos. The early Congress is extremely chaotic compared to today's Congress, which seems a lot more rehearsed. People stand up and they give speeches in Congress today, but it's not clear that anybody's really listening or anybody's changing their votes. There's no drama. There's no,

you know, sort of there's no, there's no tension in the Congress today. A lot of it is very scripted. But in the early Congress, it was a lot more chaotic. And in some ways, that was good, but in some ways, that was also a real problem. Okay, so let's weigh in a little bit more on that, because I think people think of Congress today. And honestly, for so many individuals, we see these kind of clips on social media where maybe two lawmakers get into it on the floor of Congress, and there's a back and forth, and there might be some name calling. And there's often sort of a reference to, oh, we need to bring civility back to Congress and things like that. But you're saying that things used to actually, in the early days, be even more contentious at a different level. Explain that if you would. Yeah, actually, in a way, if you were to measure the kind of conflict that occurs in Congress, just personalities engaging in name calling or violence.

The early says first 60 years of the nation's history, there's a lot more violence and a lot more name calling in Congress than there is today. So in a way, conflict has actually gotten less intense in Congress today. There's a lot of interesting things to take away from that. Maybe the politicians, in a way, they seem to be fighting more, but they actually are getting along. They have a way of getting along, whereas the early politicians were really committed to their principles and were willing to fight over them. Dules were very common. John Randolph and Henry Clay, two great early leaders of Congress. they engage in a famous duel.

If you are in Washington, D.C. and you're on the George Washington Parkway, there's a sign where the duel took place, actually, just to commemorate the place where it's at. And it was interesting. The other interesting thing about this is that Randolph and Clay were adversaries over a generation. I mean, they fought in the House of Representatives in the 1810s, and they fought really all the way up to the 1840s over issues of centralization of power, the building of canals and the National Bank still stood as a major issue. And nevertheless, they really respected each other. And as Randolph is dying, he sort of wheeled back into the Senate to hear one of Clay's last

speeches before Randolph passes away. He says, send me to the Senate so I can hear that voice one last time before he passes away. So, you know, they engaged in these great debates and they fought really bitterly over the principles that they believed in. But somehow in the early period, they found a way to resolve their differences. I think that's the biggest thing today that's different. They would fight probably in a more intense way than we fight today, and yet they would still figure out that they had to come together, they had to agree, they had to compromise.

So something has been lost, I think, in the time since then. Our politicians don't really work together very much anymore. They are willing to fight, but they're not willing to be grown-ups and sort of overcome their differences at the end of the day. Yeah. That's so fascinating. Now, when the founders were crafting Congress, why did they see a need for two separate entities to have a House and a Senate? Yeah, it's a great question. And it's really the most important question.

All these other questions are more technical and procedural. But I think the question you're asking really gets at the most significant thing about Congress. And that is that they wanted to split the legislative power up into these two very different institutions. So this is something that people don't realize about the American founders, or it's a myth that they often believe the opposite. I always ask my students, which are the powers of government did the founders fear the most? I always say the executive because of King George and monarchy and all of that. But actually, it's very clear in the Federalist Papers that the power that they're most afraid of is the legislative power. They think that you're going to trade one tyrant for 150 or 435 or 535. And so they're really concerned about the overwhelming power of the legislative branch.

James Madison calls it the impetuous vortex in Federalist 48. And so they basically say, because the legislative power is going to be the really dominant part of our government, we have to divide it up so that it's weaker. So they actually deliberately made Congress weak by dividing it up into these two bodies and then saying essentially we want these two bodies to actually fight amongst each other. So the House and the Senate should actually fight with each other rather than join and fight the executive branch. And so I think one of the things we're thinking about in the 21st century is whether that system works too well today, whether Congress is actually too weak because it was deliberately made weaker by the Constitution by dividing it up into these two different bodies, the House and the Senate. So how do we get the House and the Senate to actually work together when it's today the President who seems to have way too much. power and the representatives need to sort of take the power back from the executive. Hmm. Hmm. Well, what would your argument be on that front of how could we strategically

move forward in a way that maybe does take a little bit of power away from the executive and enable Congress to have an appropriate amount of power? Because I do think many people listening would say, oh, I definitely don't want to see Congress have any more power than they already have. But I think even more so people would agree that the executive branch has come to have way too much power. So what would that look like to begin to find that balance? Right. Yeah. The problem we're in now is that the administrative state is here. And so if Congress doesn't do anything, that doesn't mean the national government doesn't do anything. If Congress doesn't do anything, that means the executive is going to make all of the

decision. So how do you get the power back to Congress? I think the suggestion I'm offering here is that the framers built a lot of friction into the legislative process. Friction is a great word to describe how Congress works. It's supposed to basically just be a bunch of people, you know, budding heads. And then they're supposed to butt heads across the institutions from the House to the Senate. And that makes getting anything done in Congress really difficult. And we all kind of understand that in the 21st century. But the problem is now when Congress doesn't do something, it's basically just left to some administrative body to make the rules, whether it's vaccine mandates, whether it's student loan forgiveness, whether it's environmental quality standards and water quality standards.

These things are basically all been kicked over to the bureaucracy. So the friction in Congress now actually works against us, whereas it worked for the Constitution when the framers designed it. The friction now actually makes Congress less likely to take its power back from the bureaucracy after it's all been delegated over there for the last 100 years. So I think ways of reducing friction between members and reducing friction between the House and the Senate would actually strengthen the framers' goal of preserving a representative republic rather than some administrative executive state.

Fascinating. What are some of those roles that the founders gave specifically to the Senate, not to the House, and vice versa? Yeah. So it's interesting. The Senate, they really did think that the Senate was supposed to align with the president in a lot of really important ways. So one of the ways of weakening the House and the Senate's connection to each other, Madison argues in the Federalist Papers, is to take the Senate and draw it closer to the president. So we all know about the advice and consent function of the Senate, right, whenever the president makes a nomination of what we call principal officer, the Senate has to confirm.

the nominee. Treaties have to be ratified by the Senate with a two-thirds vote. We don't do many treaties these days because we've circumvented that whole process, but the Senate was supposed to be involved in the foreign policy activities of the executive branch. So they really saw, I think, the Senate as like an adjunct or assistant to the president in a lot of ways. There's a really interesting story, George Washington, goes to the Senate in the first Congress in the 1789 period, this really critical period. And he goes over there because he asked to negotiate a treaty with a Native American tribe. And he wants to know from the Senate, what are the things I should insist upon? What are the things I should really try to make

sure I get from this treaty? And so he goes to the Senate, he's standing in front of the Senate, the President of the United States, and he has somebody read aloud various points that he wants the Senate to think about. And it's a total disaster. There are wagons. going across the Senate, and so none of the senators can hear the points as they're being read aloud. They all have a bunch of questions, and it just turns into chaos, and George Washington storms out. He screams, this defeats every purpose of my coming here, and he leaves, and that's the only time a president has ever actually gone to the Senate to try to jointly negotiate a treaty or to discuss a treaty. So advice and consent has now just become consent from the Senate.

So I think the upshot here is the Senate, I think, was thought of as a very sort of austere body. It was supposed to be filled with people who really had wisdom, who really had a lot of experience, and who would serve the president in a lot of ways that the Senate today doesn't really do. The Senate mostly rubber stamps nominees and doesn't really engage in foreign policy very much anymore. And what about the House? What are some of those things that the founders really said, okay, we want the House specifically focused on this, that even to this day, the Senate doesn't touch nearly to the extent that the House does?

Yeah, so the House, they wanted the House to be the stronger of the two. They really, contrary to today, right, we always think that the Senate as the more powerful and the House is the weaker or, you know, people don't go from the Senate to the House. They go from the House to the Senate when they run for office. but the Constitution's framers actually thought the House would be the more powerful body. So there's a famous compromise at the Constitutional Convention called the Connecticut Compromise. And it's the fight between the large states and the small states at the Constitutional Convention. The large states want proportional representation or population representation in both the House and the Senate.

And the small states say, well, we're a federal system. We're independent sovereign states. We should all have one vote because we're all equal nation, sovereign power. And so there's this fight over equal representation versus population representation of proportion. And they say, well, let's split the difference. Let's give one representation by population. Let's give the other equal representation. And that's how the House and the Senate are given their different ratios for representation.

And then they add one more thing to the compromise, and that is that all bills that raise money or all tax bills have to come out of the House of Representatives. So the government cannot assess a tax on the American people unless the direct representatives of the people in the House of Representatives agree to it. And they say, in the Federalist papers, James Madison says, this means that the House of Representatives, if it wants to, can take away all of the money that goes to the national government. And so it has the power, this is very relevant today, of course,

that has the power basically to not fund the government. And in doing so, it can get the other institutions, the Senate and the president to agree with it because it has the power over the purse. That's something that probably should be kept in mind these days when we think about the House's role in, say, raising the debt limit or appropriating money to the various departments, is that the House has this kind of cherished role. And so it's not three equal powers all vying over control of the public purse. The House is supposed to have more power than the other two.

So the framers really, this was a very important part of that compromise. And so something worth bearing in mind today is very relevant question. If the founding fathers looked at Congress today, would they be glad at kind of the structure? What do you think their thoughts and takeaways would be as far as how Congress has progressed? Would they be surprised? Yeah. Yeah, it's a really good question. It's a hard question.

I think they would be probably more happy with Congress than we are today. but I don't think they would be entirely happy. So Americans today have a really dismal view of Congress. They, they, like the approval ratings are like in the teens. And it's just consistently over years and years and years. I think the framers would probably say, you know, we still hold elections. We still have representatives. They still voice our opinions.

And the government still generally speaking responds to changes in public opinion. Although I think they would, the things that they would be most. disappointed in our first of all and most significantly the delegation of all of this power by Congress over to the bureaucracy. I think they would say the Congress doesn't make the important decisions today. These are all made in the administrative state and we set up a republic. We didn't set up an administrative state. So I think they would be extremely disappointed by the delegation of power to the bureaucracy. But on the other hand, I think they would say that all of these changes that have taken place, especially in transportation,

and communication, I think they would understand that Congress has evolved as those changes have taken place. So, for instance, they don't get a quorum in the first Congress until, like, five months after Washington is inaugurated because people have to travel by wagon or by horse for hundreds of miles, and it takes the months to do it. Today, members of Congress sort of fly back and forth all the time, and it's not as significant of an issue. So I think they would say, obviously, Congress will change as the, you know, as the members of

these circumstances change. But I think it would be really disappointed in how Congress has given up the really important decisions and how so much of our government is now exercised, not by our representatives, but by executive branch or administrative officials. So fascinating. Joseph Postel, Hillsdale College, Associate Professor of Politics and Heritage Foundation Visiting Fellow. Thank you so much for our time today. We just really appreciate you being with us to kick off this series on how Congress really works. That was great to be with you. I look forward to listening to the rest of the series. Absolutely.

And with that, that's going to do it for this first episode in our How Congress Works Daily Signal podcast series. Be sure to check out the shows tomorrow and on Friday as we dive a little bit deeper into how Congress is operating today, everything from the passage of bills to committees and hearings and what happens behind closed doors in Congress. But if you have you, have not had the chance already to check out our evening show, make sure you do so every weekday around 5 p.m. We bring you the top news of the day. These are the headlines that you don't want to miss. Also take a moment to subscribe to The Daily Signal wherever you like to listen to podcasts and help us reach more listeners by taking a moment to leave a five-star rating and review.

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