There's Nothing Democratic about Our Founders’ Disdain for the Stupid Filibuster

Or: Hamilton and Madison Will Never Be Our Friends

It’s true, as noted lately in liberal discourse, that both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison, when partnered up as framers and explainers of the Constitution of the United States, opposed the kind of minoritarian, states-oriented procedures seen today in the Senate filibuster and other tactics that impede national legislative majorities. The inherently anti-majoritarian nature not only of the filibuster—it goes back to ancient Rome, though the founders hadn’t seen it routinized, as we have—but also of the composition of the Senate itself, with its two members from each state regardless of population size, represent major departures from Hamilton’s and Madison’s longstanding goals for the creation of a national government.

They thought majorities, with some important qualifications, should rule in republican legislative institutions. Most importantly, they were out to disable the states’ governments' participation, insofar as possible, in the national government. The composition of the Senate thus represented an unhappy compromise for the nationalist group of the 1780’s, as did the workings of the electoral college, enabling the states’ governments to appoint electors of the president.

As did the infamous three-fifths clause. It counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of proportional representation in the House of Representatives, and for other processes dependent on population proportions, thus giving the South, as a bloc, and despite its minority of free people, far greater sway in the national government than the North, which was less dependent on and in some cases actually going off the institution of forced labor by racial slavery. Such mechanisms conspired to defeat, on a multitude of levels, majority rule in the processes of the national government.

Hamilton and Madison didn’t like that, and many people today, like me, complain that such processes are undemocratic. That's because they are—really, they’re antidemocratic, at utter odds with how some of us want our country to operate.

But that’s not why Hamilton and Madison didn’t like minoritarian process in the national government. Quite the contrary. They were antidemocratic too.