ZadekpediaOrigins and purpose
The Federalist Papers were, by Bob Zadek’s account, 85 pieces written by Madison, Jay and Hamilton in New York to persuade New York to vote for ratification of the Constitution. Zadek marks the anniversary of the first paper’s publication, placing it in 1788, and describes the series as op-ed pieces rather than a record of legislative intent. In his view the frequent citation of the Papers as evidence of what the founders meant is misplaced: they were written to persuade, not to educate, and he notes that the National Constitution Center’s daily blog characterized them as essentially a public relations campaign. His advice to listeners is to take their writing with a grain of salt, since they are articles of persuasion and not legislative history. Robert Alt of the Buckeye Institute: Power to the States (2017)
Frank H. Buckley, discussing the Framers’ design, ranks the convention debates above the Papers as a source on the structure of liberty, calling that set of readings unbeatable anywhere else, not even the Federalist Papers. Bob Zadek adds that James Madison reconstructed the convention debates nightly from memory and notes, kept the book secret for many years so the country would not be affected by it, and released it to the public much later in his life; it became a crucial source document for understanding those debates. Has America Become an “Elective Monarchy”? (2014)
Federalists and Anti-Federalists
William Watkins Jr. describes the ratification fight as splitting the country into two factions: the Federalists, who supported the newly drafted Constitution, and the Anti-Federalists, who opposed it. Asked which camp history shows understood the long-term effects better, Watkins runs what he calls a tally almost like a scoreboard through the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, weighing the Federalists’ promises that the document would be limited and that certain clauses conferred no really new powers on the national government against the Anti-Federalists’ predictions of how those provisions would actually be used. On that tally, he concludes, the Anti-Federalists were correct. Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)
Watkins names the clauses the Anti-Federalists warned about: the General Welfare clause at the beginning of Congress’s enumerated powers, the Necessary and Proper clause at the end of them, and the Commerce clause, which he says has become a sort of universal jurisdiction for the national government over many matters. They also predicted that the treaty power could be used to undermine the rights of the people and the states. He characterizes the Anti-Federalists as dedicated to a form of republicanism stressing government at the local level, what Jefferson called his ward republics, and as holding a different vision of government and republicanism than the one we have today. Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)
Bob Zadek frames the same material as a question about whether the founders got it wrong, observing that the Anti-Federalists saw something the Federalists either knew was there but did not care about or did not see. He invites listeners to read a collection of essays written by those who opposed the Constitution, The Anti-Federalist Papers, and says their dire predictions—about the king-like power of the president and the reach of the federal government into everyday lives—all came true, to a T. He lists Madison, Hamilton, Jay and Washington among the Federalists whose promises he says turned out not to be so, and proposes to ask Watkins whether the Federalists knew they were selling something other than what was promised or simply did not understand what they were doing as well as the Anti-Federalists did. Crossroads for Liberty with William Watkins Jr. (2017)
Hamilton’s “least dangerous branch”
In a later episode Bob Zadek invokes the Papers for a different purpose: Hamilton’s observation, which Zadek places in Federalist 78 while allowing he could be wrong about the number, that the Supreme Court was the least dangerous branch because it had neither arms nor a purse and could only say what it thought, with no power to enforce what it believed to be the law of the land. Zadek tells guest David Kaplan that Hamilton, who knew a great deal about a great deal, may have gotten his view of the Court wrong, and that the Court has become far more powerful than the founders ever envisioned. Demystifying the Supreme Court (2019)
Kaplan’s book The Most Dangerous Branch takes its title from that phrase. Kaplan says that when Scalia was alive, Justice Kennedy in effect ruled the country on many key political and social questions, and that Scalia’s death did not change that arithmetic but meant the next justice would arguably shift the balance. What struck him at that moment in February 2016, the beginning of a presidential election year, was hearing Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, all agree that the next justice could well determine American social life for the next quarter century. He frames the book’s argument as a challenge to the idea that a single unelected, unaccountable official should control so much policy. Demystifying the Supreme Court (2019)
Across episodes
The topic recurs in four episodes spanning 2014 to 2019, and the treatment shifts with the question asked. Buckley treats the Papers as secondary to the convention debates; Watkins and Zadek treat them as the Federalists’ side of a ratification argument whose predictions can be scored against later history; Zadek in 2017 calls them persuasion rather than legislative history; and by 2019 the Papers supply Hamilton’s phrase for measuring how far the Court has exceeded his description. No excerpt shows a guest responding to another episode’s characterization.