THE PARTY OF WASHINGTON VS THE PARTY OF JEFFERSON:

The Founding Fathers Versus the Tea Party (Ron Chernow, 9/24/10, NY Times)

The Constitution’s framers dedicated Article I to the legislature in the hope that, as the branch nearest the people, it would prove pre-eminent. But Washington, as our first president, quickly despaired of a large, diffuse Congress ever exercising coherent leadership. The first time he visited the Senate to heed its “advice and consent,” about a treaty with the Creek Indians, he was appalled by the disorder. “This defeats every purpose of my coming here,” he grumbled, then departed with what one senator branded an air of “sullen dignity.” Washington went back one more time before dispensing with the Senate’s advice altogether, henceforth seeking only its consent.

President Washington’s Treasury secretary, Alexander Hamilton, wasted no time in testing constitutional limits as he launched a burst of government activism. In December 1790, he issued a state paper calling for the first central bank in the country’s history, the forerunner of the Federal Reserve System.

Because the Constitution didn’t include a syllable about such an institution, Hamilton, with his agile legal mind, pounced on Article I, Section 8, which endowed Congress with all powers “necessary and proper” to perform tasks assigned to it in the national charter. Because the Constitution empowered the government to collect taxes and borrow money, Hamilton argued, a central bank might usefully discharge such functions. In this way, he devised a legal doctrine of powers “implied” as well as enumerated in the Constitution.

Aghast at the bank bill, James Madison, then a congressman from Virginia, pored over the Constitution and could not “discover in it the power to incorporate a bank.” Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson was no less horrified by Hamilton’s legal legerdemain. He thought that only measures indispensable to the discharge of enumerated powers should be allowed, not merely those that might prove convenient. He spied how many programs the assertive Hamilton was prepared to drive through the glaring loophole of the “necessary and proper” clause. And he prophesied that for the federal government “to take a single step beyond the boundaries thus specifically drawn ... is to take possession of a boundless field of power.”

After reviewing cogent legal arguments presented by Hamilton and Jefferson, President Washington came down squarely on Hamilton’s side, approving the first central bank.

John Marshall, the famed chief justice, traced the rise of the two-party system to that blistering episode, and American politics soon took on a nastily partisan tone. That the outstanding figures of the two main factions, Hamilton and Jefferson, both belonged to Washington’s cabinet attests to the fundamental disagreements within the country. Hamilton and his Federalist Party espoused a strong federal government, led by a powerful executive branch, and endorsed a liberal reading of the Constitution; although he resisted the label at first, Washington clearly belonged to this camp.

Jefferson and his Republicans (not related to today’s Republicans) advocated states’ rights, a weak federal government and strict construction of the Constitution. The Tea Party can claim legitimate descent from Jefferson and Madison, even though they founded what became the Democratic Party.