(Continued from Robertson.)

Madison’s Convention Opponents and American Politics

The original Constitution’s design is not the product of a systematic philosophical plan, but the by-product of a path-dependent sequence of political compromises largely forced on Madison and his allies by their Convention opponents. No one in May 1787 anticipated the final product. For 39 signers, the document met the criteria for republican government and seemed likely to produce better policy outcomes than the status quo.

American federalism was not designed simply to check national power, because too many of the Convention delegates wanted the national government to have some very effective powers to provide for currency regulation, commercial treaties, a national revenue stream, national defense, and other nationalized public goods beneficial to their constituents and the nation.

While Madison battled for extensive national sovereignty, Roger Sherman advanced the idea of dual sovereignty as a justification for nationalizing some public goods while protecting the states’ remaining autonomy and political prerogatives. Federalism in the Constitution emerged from a long series of interdependent, issue-by-issue compromises, guided by the ongoing clash between the Madison and the Sherman positions on which level of government would control which tools of public policy and how each level would use those tools to govern politics.

The delegates artfully blurred many politically portentous terms and boundaries between state and national authority. The delegates never specified precisely what kinds of public goods would be provided by the states and which by the national government. They did not specify a list of the civil rights and liberties to which Americans would be entitled; instead, Madison put forward a bill of rights in the first Congress after promising his constituents he would do so.

The Committee of Detail’s insertion of the “necessary and proper” clause strongly suggests that even Connecticut’s delegates were willing to permit the expansion of national power to cover hard cases and unexpected contingencies. The delegates’ explicit rejection of Sherman’s proposal to place state police powers beyond Constitutional amendment demonstrates their desire to leave the range of national authority fungible. National power could be expanded but could not be expanded at will.

Competing claims of states’ rights and national responsibility have structured the most substantive political conflicts of American political development, including slavery, the regulation of business and investment, civil and criminal rights, religion, welfare, health, education, the environment, alcohol, and a host of other issues. The ambiguous boundary between interstate and intrastate commerce became a flashpoint for many significant struggles over the control of the nation’s economic development.

Political interests still utilize the Constitution’s unsettled political frontier of federal authority as an expedient tool for achieving substantive policy outcomes. Often, “states’ rights” and decentralization are associated with conservative policy agendas, such as that of Ronald Reagan. Liberals, however, regularly use states’ rights arguments when they help achieve the policy outcomes they advocate, just as conservatives regularly invoke national authority to engineer the outcomes they prefer. Dual federal and state sovereignty, then, fundamentally is a political invention, devised by skilled politicians with deliberate and expedient imprecision. Searching for the definitive original intent for the specific division of powers between the nation and the states is a fool’s errand.

Conclusion

The Convention delegates who opposed James Madison’s Virginia Plan have had a far greater impact on American politics than most Americans appreciate. Opponents of the Virginia Plan aimed to add a few carefully chosen powers and offices to the national government while, at the same time, protecting most of the states’ policy prerogatives and ensuring that the state governments would influence the way the national government used its powers.

Undeniably, Madison’s opponents achieved much of what they sought. Yet the political synergy between Madison and Sherman may have been necessary for the Constitution’s adoption.

Ironically, Madison’s opponents’ achievements also became indispensable for the success of Madison’s own subsequent political career. Their inherently incompatible visions of national interest opened a political chasm between U.S. Representative Madison and Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton in the early 1790s. Madison, defending “state’s rights,” used Constitutional guarantees of state policy authority to build a national coalition of diverse interests opposed to Hamilton’s program for national economic direction. Madison’s political career after 1787, like America’s political development, owes a considerable—–if unappreciated—–debt to his opponents’ influence on the Constitution’s design.