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

early American history and political philosophy.

My name is Jay Cost and with me is my co-host, Luke Thompson.

And we are continuing our look at the

historical Congress. Now, looking at Congress through the lens of history is going to take us in many

respects. It has taken us in many respects through American political history because, of course,

Congress is America's preeminent political institution.

So it's hard to separate the one from the other.

But what we've been trying to do in this series of historical investigations of Congress

is really to see how Congress itself changes and is changed by the political circumstance.

So, for instance, a couple episodes ago, we talked about the patronage system and how that

ended up increasing the power in the Senate and things like that.

The last week's episode, we left off talking about Woodrow Wilson and Wilson's vision

of presidential governance coming to bear really from 1913 through 1917, more or less.

Basically, Wilson's first term. Second term is dominated by the considerations

regarding the war. And Wilson, as we had mentioned, brings to the White House an argument

that the government lacks coherence. It's almost a kind of Hamiltonian argument.

If you think of Hamilton as being a counterbalance to Madison, Madison had thought that

policy should basically be formed from the ground up through a series of compromises and

bargains.

Hamilton, on the other hand, sort of saw a role for elite policymakers to govern and guide and manage factions.

Wilson is more in the latter camp, although I don't want to sort of call him a Neo-Hamiltonian

...