The Founding Fathers<\/a> feared the power of the legislative branch from its inception in the late 1700s.\u00a0They did not want to trade one tyrant for a group of tyrants, one professor tells \u201c The Daily Signal Podcast<\/a>,\u201d so they \u201cdeliberately made Congress weak by dividing it up into these two bodies,\u201d the House and the Senate.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to Joseph Postell, Hillsdale College<\/a> associate professor of politics and Heritage Foundation visiting fellow, the founders wanted the House and Senate<\/a> to \u201cfight amongst each other\u201d because this would create a check on power. And fight they did.\u00a0(The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) <\/p>\n

\u201cThe early politicians were really committed to their principles and were willing to fight over them,\u201d Postell said, adding that \u201cDuels were very common.\u201d<\/p>\n

Postell joins \u201cThe Daily Signal Podcast\u201d for part one of a three-part series on how Congress really works. He discusses the history of Congress<\/a> and what the Founding Fathers would say about what the legislative branch has become today. <\/p>\n

Listen to the podcast below or read the lightly edited transcript: <\/p>\n

<\/iframe><\/p>\nVirginia Allen: It is my pleasure today to be joined by Hillsdale College associate professor of politics and Heritage Foundation visiting fellow Joseph Postell. Mr. Postell, thanks so much for being with us today.<\/strong><\/p>\nJoseph Postell: <\/strong>It\u2019s great to be with you.<\/p>\nAllen: Well, I\u2019m excited because we are taking the next few days to talk about how Congress really works. 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. <\/strong><\/p>\nSo, I want to go all the way back to the 1700s first, and specifically to 1774. That\u2019s when we had the first meeting of the Continental Congress. What was the Continental Congress?<\/strong><\/p>\nPostell: <\/strong>The Continental Congress precedes the United States Constitution. I think one of the interesting things about the Continental Congress is the word itself, Congress. <\/p>\nSo 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 hash out their differences.<\/p>\nThey use this term Congress even before the Constitution is ratified to set up the United States Congress we have today. They use this word Congress because they really believed in a federal system. They really believed that they were states that were united for limited purposes, but a lot of the power and the sovereignty was going to lie back with the states.<\/p>\nSo under this conception, really, it\u2019s not an entirely national system. It\u2019s actually a federal system in which 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.<\/p>\nYou can even see from the very beginning, all the way back, as you suggest, the idea of Congress as it\u2019s supposed to be, people who come from different backgrounds, from different interests, from different groups of people, from different parts of the country.<\/p>\nAnd 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 interest of the union as a whole.<\/p>\nAllen: 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 have in mind as they crafted that first Congress?<\/strong><\/p>\nPostell: <\/strong>Yeah, so, the first Congress, like you say, in 1789, is referred to as the First Congress. That\u2019s sort of its official name. It makes really important decisions that have very high presidential value. <\/p>\nThere\u2019s even one decision they make about who gets to fire the heads of departments, like the Treasury and State and Foreign Affairs departments. And we actually call it the Decision of 1789 because it\u2019s that important. <\/p>\nThe First Congress makes these really important decisions about how the government\u2019s going to be set up, who\u2019s actually going to be in charge of various functions.<\/p>\nBut I think the deeper question here is, what did the Framers expect Congress to be? They really saw that the Congress would be the centerpiece of the republican system. 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.<\/p>\nBut they didn\u2019t have a lot of clearly thought-out ideas about how representatives were supposed to behave. They didn\u2019t have a lot of experience with republican government, with popular government. It really wasn\u2019t the norm when the Constitution was ratified.<\/p>\nSo when you read Article 1 of the Constitution, there actually isn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\nSo 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. <\/p>\nAnd 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.<\/p>\nBut 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.<\/p>\nAllen: Talk a little bit more about that if you would. What were the specific things that are laid out in the Constitution that the Founders said, \u201cYes, we want this power to rest in the hands of Congress?\u201d And then, what are the areas, in especially those initial years, that they started to realize, \u201cOh, this is a power that we need to ensure that Congress does have,\u201d that maybe wasn\u2019t explicitly originally laid out in the Constitution?<\/strong><\/p>\nPostell: <\/strong>They think immediately that the big 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. <\/p>\nThe country is in massive debt because of the Revolutionary War. So a lot of the financial issues needed to be worked out. <\/p>\nThis is why Alexander Hamilton has become so famous, is because we\u2019ve now learned so much about what Alexander Hamilton was doing behind the scenes to influence Congress from his position as secretary of 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\u2014which itself was highly controversial, about whether Congress actually had that power or not\u2014but to do all of these things that would kind of provide for a stable economy at the national level.<\/p>\nSo those are some of the major issues that 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 the nation\u2019s fiscal situation, these were the real priorities of the Congress in the early years. <\/p>\nAnd also, 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\u2019d be organized, and so forth.<\/p>\nSo there\u2019s 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\u2019s Congress, which seems a lot more rehearsed. <\/p>\nPeople stand up and they give speeches in Congress today, but it\u2019s not clear that anybody\u2019s really listening or anybody\u2019s changing their votes. There\u2019s no drama, there\u2019s no tension in the Congress today, a lot of it\u2019s very scripted. <\/p>\nBut 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.<\/p>\nAllen: Let\u2019s 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 clips on social media where maybe two lawmakers get into it on the floor of Congress and there\u2019s a back and forth, and there might be some name-calling. And today, there\u2019s often a reference to a need to bring civility back to Congress. But you\u2019re saying that things used to actually be even more contentious. Explain that if you would.<\/strong><\/p>\nPostell: <\/strong>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, say, first 60 years of the nation\u2019s history, there\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nThere\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nDuels 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\u2019re on the George Washington Parkway, there\u2019s a sign where the duel took place, actually, just to commemorate the place where it\u2019s at. And it was interesting. <\/p>\nThe 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 banks still stood as a major issue. And nevertheless, they really respected each other. <\/p>\nAnd as Randolph is dying, he\u2019s sort of wheeled back into the Senate to hear one of Clay\u2019s last speeches before Randolph passes away, and he says, \u201cSend me to the Senate so I can hear that voice one last time,\u201d before he passes away.<\/p>\nSo 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. <\/p>\nAnd I think that\u2019s the biggest thing today that\u2019s 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.<\/p>\nSo something has been lost, I think, in the time since then that our politicians don\u2019t really work together very much anymore. They are willing to fight, but they\u2019re not willing to be grown-ups and sort of overcome their differences at the end of the day.<\/p>\nAllen: That\u2019s 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?<\/strong><\/p>\nPostell: <\/strong>Yeah, it\u2019s a great question, and it\u2019s really the most important question. All these other questions are more technical and procedural. But I think the question you\u2019re 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.<\/p>\nThis is something that people don\u2019t realize about the American Founders, or it\u2019s a myth that they often believe the opposite. I always ask my students, which of the powers of government did the Founders fear the most? And they always say the executive because of King George and monarchy and all of that.<\/p>\nBut actually, it\u2019s very clear in the Federalist Papers that the power that they\u2019re most afraid of is the legislative power. They think that you\u2019re going to trade one tyrant for 150 or 435 or 535. So they\u2019re really concerned about the overwhelming power of the legislative branch. James Madison calls it the impetuous vortex in Federalist 48.<\/p>\nAnd 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\u2019s weaker. <\/p>\nSo 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.<\/p>\nAnd so I think one of the things we\u2019re 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. <\/p>\nSo how do we get the House and the Senate to actually work together when it\u2019s 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?<\/p>\nAllen: If the Founding Fathers looked at Congress today, would they be glad at the structure? What do you think their thoughts and takeaways would be as far as how Congress has progressed? Would they be surprised?<\/strong><\/p>\nPostell: <\/strong>Yeah, that\u2019s a really good question. It\u2019s a hard question. I think they would be probably more happy with Congress than we are today, but I don\u2019t think they would be entirely happy.<\/p>\nAmericans today have a really dismal view of Congress. The approval ratings are like in the teens, and it\u2019s just consistently over years and years and years. I think the Framers would probably say 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.<\/p>\nI think the things that they would be most disappointed in are, first of all, and most significantly, the delegation of all of this power by Congress over to the bureaucracy. <\/p>\nI think they would say the Congress doesn\u2019t make the important decisions today. These are all made in the administrative state. And we set up a republic. We didn\u2019t set up an administrative state. So I think they would be extremely disappointed by the delegation of power to the bureaucracy.<\/p>\nBut 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. <\/p>\nSo, for instance, they don\u2019t get a quorum in the First Congress until five months after Washington is inaugurated because people have to travel by wagon or by horse for hundreds of miles, and it takes them months to do it. Today, members of Congress sort of fly back and forth all the time, and it\u2019s not as significant of an issue.<\/p>\nSo I think they would say, obviously, Congress will change as these circumstances change, but I think they 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.<\/p>\nAllen: <\/strong>Joseph Postell, thank you so much for your time today.<\/strong><\/p>\nPostell: <\/strong>It was great to be with you. I look forward to listening to the rest of the series.<\/p>\nHave an opinion about this article? To sound off, please email\u00a0<\/em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.dailysignal.com\/2023\/08\/29\/why-founding-fathers-deliberately-made-congress-weak-professor-explains\/mailto:letters@DailySignal.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener\">letters@DailySignal.com<\/em><\/a>,\u00a0and we\u2019ll consider publishing your edited remarks in our regular \u201cWe Hear You\u201d feature. 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