Why America Has One President: Federalist No. 70 Explained

Dr. Beienberg explains Alexander Hamilton's arguments in Federalist No. 70 for establishing a single executive rather than a council or committee to lead the executive branch. Hamilton's case rests on the fundamental differences between legislative and executive power, with the former benefiting from diverse voices and the latter requiring efficiency and clear accountability.

• Executive power demands unity for efficiency and clear accountability
• Multiple executives create internal division and blame-shifting
• The Roman consul system showed the disadvantages of divided executive authority
• The British monarchy used councils to deflect blame from the king
• The American presidency is designed to be clearly accountable to the people, unlike a hereditary monarch
• Hamilton's vision emphasizes knowing exactly who to blame for the poor execution of laws

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome back everyone .
We are continuing our deep diveinto Federalist no 70, and we
have Dr Beinberg back with us,and one of the questions I
wanted to ask you, dr Beinberg,is you know we've talked in
previous podcasts with Dr Kreeseabout influences that the
founders had.
Why does the founders had, whydoes Federalist 70, or how does

(00:30):
it defend having one person inthe executive as opposed?

Speaker 2 (00:32):
to a group of people.
So this is one of the placeswhere you see the Federalists
invoking not just classicalantiquity but also, in both
explicitly and implicitly, theexample of experience as part of
the British Empire.
And so the fundamental argumentthat they make in Federalist 70
is that if we think thatexecutive power is fundamentally

(00:55):
different than legislativepower, we want to have a single
unit the term that gets usedlater is unitary executive who
is ultimately accountable forexecuting the law Again, not for
making the law.
Making the law, you want lotsof different voices, lots of
deliberation, this little messyprocess.
But once you are executing thelaw or, on the foreign policy

(01:17):
side, making sort of quick lifeand death decisions about
deploying forces or negotiatinga treaty or something like that
that you want that to be asingle figure.
And so they make basically asort of logical case for why
this is important, whichfundamentally boils down to it's
efficient to execute the lawand it's accountable that if the

(01:37):
law is executed poorly, youknow who to blame.
That ultimately the presidentcan't point at lackeys and say,
well, my lackeys wereincompetent.
Well, you pick the lackeys Someof them are required to be
confirmed by the Senate but you,ultimately nobody is in your
cabinet, nobody is working foryou, that you fundamentally
object to, at least at the upperlevels.

(01:58):
It gets a little dicey wherewe're talking lower, lower
levels of the federalbureaucracy, and that's
something that I think theSupreme Court has been sort of
kicking around the last fewyears.
But at the upper level it's notthat controversial on that
front that these are people asHamilton says in Federalist 70,
that the president has picked.
So what's the alternative tothis system in which you know
who the president is, you knowwho to blame for bad execution

(02:21):
of the law?
He says well, one model is theRaman model, where you have
multiple consoles and thesemultiple consoles are squabbling
for power.
They're squabbling for blame,right?
Well, they're going to each say, well, the other console made
the mistakes that did this, orthe other console is going to be
potentially incentivized not toenforce something that was

(02:42):
pushed by the first console,because then the first console
is going to get credit for it,right?
So Hamilton says you're goingto get this really messy system
where there's internal division,which, again, is good when
you're making policy.
It's bad when you're executingpolicy.
So you're going to basicallyget the disadvantages of the
legislature without theadvantages.
So we don't want that.

(03:03):
Roman model shows us why thiswas a mistake.
Moreover, in Federalist 7071 and72, they point to the example
of the British monarchy and, toa lesser extent, the councils
which are attached to some ofthe governors in response to the
British imperial experience.

(03:24):
So so the example in theBritish imperial model or in or
in some of the state governmentswith the governors, is that you
have this council and sort offor the executive to act needs
this sort of buy-in at somelevel from it varies based on
which state and the Britishmodel but you need some sort of
buy-in from the council, or thecouncil is helping to execute

(03:48):
the law, and this meant thatgovernors could blame the
council or, most commonly, theBritish monarch or the monarch's
defenders could blame thecouncil if law was executed
badly or if decisions regardingthe colonial experience were
missed.
And this is part of this, asFranklin points out at one point
in the convention, is usefulbecause no one has elected the

(04:14):
British monarch.
This is a point that Hamiltonreiterates here in these
Federalist Papers, right?
So you sort of want the fictionof saying, yeah, the people who
screwed it up are the people wecan easily replace.
The king is sacred, but thepresident isn't sacred, and you
want to be able to clearly makethat blame, rather than the
finger pointing that they hadseen in the British imperial

(04:35):
model or you're starting to seein some of the state governments
as well, where they can saywell, the council stopped me
from doing it, the council mademe do it and so yeah, in these
Federalist Papers, hamilton ispointing to recent experience in
the American statehood andcolonial system, as well as
classical antiquity of justseeing that a truly executive

(04:59):
institution should beaccountable and clean and
singular in terms of who isresponsible and who ultimately
is to be blamed.
This might be different in aninherited monarchy, where you
want to even have these littleextra roadblocks, but we didn't
inherit a monarchy.
Someone becomes presidentbecause they were chosen by the

(05:21):
electoral college, not becauseof who their father or
grandfather were.

Speaker 1 (05:25):
Thank you, dr Byenberg.
That was a very conciseexplanation on why there's just
one president and not three orfour.
Thank you, quick question, yeah.