The Founders’ Most Deliberative Body

March 8, 2010

Whenever there’s talk of the founders and their intent to make the Senate the more deliberative chamber of Congress, I think it would be worthwhile to bear in mind some context:

  • The great constitutional debates of the first Congress took place in the House of Representatives, not the Senate. The House hardly suffered for lack of deliberation. Notably, the historic debate leading up to the famous “decision of 1789″—which established a congressional precedent by which executive officers were understood to serve at the pleasure of the President—took place in the House. This is especially interesting given that the issue under debate was largely about the unique constitutional powers of the Senate. (One view in the debate held that, because the Senate’s “advice and consent” was required to appoint top executive officers, Senate approval should also be required to remove them.)
  • Senate proceedings were actually closed to the public and the press prior to 1794.
  • James Madison, “father of the Constitution,” served in the House, not the Senate. That’s not decisive evidence of anything, but no one can deny that Madison had serious deliberation skills.
  • When the first Congress was seated in 1789, only eleven states had ratified the constitution. Twenty years later, in 1809, there were 17 states, making 34 senators. There’s no magic number of senators above which limits on debate must be institutionalized to prevent runaway exploitation of the rules protecting minority participation in debate, but surely the size of the body is relevant to the need for such rules. And if so, well, it’s only natural that the Senate did not adopt such rules in the early years—it didn’t need to.1
  1. The history of senate procedure is actually more complicated than that. There apparently was a rule to stop debate and move to a vote—”moving the previous question”—which was discontinued in 1806. But discussion of that will have to wait for a future post. [↩]
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