This week’s Power Line University seminar on The Federalist completes our discussion of the separation of powers in Federalists 47 – 51, and then takes an extended detour into the Progressive Era attack on the separation of powers and other basic principles embedded in The Federalist—and by extension, in the Constitution. There are few things more fun than beating up Woodrow Wilson, but we note several of the ways his legacy deformed the presidency and paved the way for today’s administrative state.

This contrast continues with an introduction to how the founders conceived the presidency at the Philadelphia Convention in 1787, and set the stage for our close look next week at Hamilton’s robust understanding and defense of the presidency.

We continue our leisurely stroll through The Federalist with an extended look at Federalist numbers 47 through 51, which explain the key concept of the separation of powers—a phrase that is nowhere found in the text of the Constitution, but which is clearly implied by the design and structure of the text. But Madison and Hamilton leave nothing to chance, citing “the celebrated Montesquieu” as a theoretical authority, but drawing also on the mixed experience of the early state constitutions.

Next week we’ll take a detour and explain why the Progressive movement singled out the separation of powers as their chief point of attack on the Constitution.

This week’s class resumes our leisurely stroll through The Federalist starting with Federalists #33 and #37, and the “partly federal, partly national” character of the Union under the proposed Constitution—a subject that remains as confusing and contentious today as it was then. Lucretia walks us through how the issue began to settle out starting with the landmark 1819 case of McCulloch v. Maryland. We also have a lively discussion of the “necessary and proper” clause that is often thought the source of much mischief from the federal government today, along with the “general welfare clause.”

From here Steve takes a deep dive into the mis-applications of the “general welfare clause” by looking at the passage in Federalist #45 where Madison says the powers of the federal government are “few and defined,” laying it next to our current federal government whose powers are nearly unlimited and undefined. This is in service of the question: Was Madison wrong about how our government would work? Maybe not; it turns out, as Steve explains, that the complete disregard for constitutional limits we see today is of relative recent origin, and that in fact Madison’s views on the proper limits of government held up longer than we might think.

Yesterday’s third class session of Power Line University went through Federalist 11 through 23, drawing out in particular some of Hamilton’s reflections on taxation that remain relevant to some of our tax debates today (especially Lizzie Warren’s proposed wealth tax), and also Hamilton’s very spirited attack on European politics (and colonialism!) that none of today’s ridiculous “de-colonizers” ever reference because they don’t know about it, and wouldn’t like in any case once they see the principles behind Hamilton’s critique.

We also have a lively argument about whether or why Hamilton’s thoughts about how the new national government would not be interested in usurping or commandeering the power of the states, or in regulating in detail the lives of citizens, might have been mistaken, which has fresh relevance at the very moment the federal government was talking about taking away our gas stoves. Lucretia also let Steve sneak in some Scottish Enlightenment material from David Hume as background to the “extended republican” hypothesis.

Yesterday we held our second class session of Power Line University, this time taking up the famous Federalist #10, drawing out key points of James Madison’s views on how an “extended republic”—long thought impossible—was a solution for the perpetual defects and eventual failures of republican governments. His views on equality and property come in for special attention.

For those who may wish to take in the slides we used online, you can watch the whole class session at this YouTube link.

Lucretia and I held the first “classroom” for PLU (Power Line University) yesterday, with 110 people ultimately tuning in live for our first formal session on The Federalist Papers. We had a couple of technical difficulties—for some reason we kept failing to get the Chat window working right—and we had some hiccups admitting some live questions and comments from viewers, but we hope to have these ironed out for our next session which will likely be mid-week next week. Anyway, here is the podcast version for those of you who weren’t able to join us live.

Our first session got off to a bit of a slow start—like the Federalist Papers themselves—with a look at numbers 1 – 9. (We had planned to include the famous Federalist 10 in this first session, but are putting it off to the next session.) The first few papers review at length the case against the disunity of the infant nation if the Constitution was not ratified and the United States split into three or four regional confederacies. Things really get hopping with Hamilton’s high-spirited Federalist 9, which is where we had to break off for the day.

We get a steady stream of emails from readers and listeners who want to know if any of my or Lucretia’s college courses are webcast or otherwise available online, and unfortunately the answer is No, partly for legal reasons but also for some technical reasons (streaming live classes is not as easy as it might seem, and the recording quality is often poor). But we have for the longest time been thinking about offering some of our class content on Power Line in an organized fashion, and so with this episode, we are pleased to inaugurate a new feature, “Power Line University.”

The first PLU course will be devoted to the Federalist Papers, or, as we like to call it, “the owner’s manual for the Constitution.” For this first trial episode, Lucretia and I decided that each of us would share three favorite passages from The Federalist, and explain why these passages in particular are significant or relevant to our current moment. (If you want to follow along at home on this first episode, the passages we selected are from Federalist #s 1, 10, 43, 31, 55, and 57.)