Welcome to constitutionally speaking, a podcast about the United States Constitution,

Early American History and Political Philosophy.

My name is Jay Cost, and with me is my partner in crime, Luke Thompson. And this week,

we are continuing our look at the historical Congress. I just want to say at the outset,

one of the challenges, I think, in studying subjects of political science, such as Congress,

as opposed to studying history, is that there really is no obvious starting point when you're

talking about an institution of politics because everything is kind of interconnected.

Everything is caused by everything else in a way that at least with history you have

temporality giving you an opportunity

to say, okay, we're starting here, right? We're starting with the Renaissance and moving forward,

or we're starting with the end of the French and Indian War moving forward. And one of the

challenges is when we're dealing with Congress is because, you know, we're going to be talking

about parties and committees and things like that without, you know, having yet sat down and really

gone over the needy, gritty of the functions that they serve. And so I think one of our overarching

goals with this series is that if something while Luke and I are talking feels a little underdeveloped

at that point, hopefully by the end, when you can kind of see the whole picture of Congress,

it'll make more sense.

I mean, and the reason I bring this up is that, you know, last week we were talking about the development of the committee system as a hedge or maybe hedge is wrong work, counterweight

to executive influence and the need to develop

policy expertise. We're going to get into that later on when we actually talk about the modern

committee system as a major function that the committee served. And likewise, we're going to be

talking today about how early on in,

...