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Course: Constitution 101 Sandbox > Unit 4

Lesson 4: 6.4: Executive Branch—The Founders' Vision

Info Brief: The Founding Story of the Presidency

Learn about how the Founders envisioned the Presidency.

Overview

The framers had a tough time deciding how best to structure the presidency. As children of the Enlightenment, they often looked to history and to their own lived experiences for clues about which forms of government worked and which failed. But these sources of evidence didn’t provide them with many helpful examples to follow when it came to the presidency.

When the framers looked to Europe, they saw powerful kings. When they looked to their own state constitutions, they saw executives too weak to govern effectively. And when they looked to their own Congress under the existing Article of Confederation, they saw a body inadequate to the task of shepherding a young (but growing) nation down its path toward greatness.

At the same time, the framers feared a powerful executive. After all, not too long before the Convention, they had fought a revolution to secure their independence from the British monarchy. They remembered the abuses of King George III and his officials in colonial America—abuses that helped lead to the American Revolution. Prior to independence, royal governors vetoed popularly enacted law and shut down assemblies elected by the colonists. The American people didn’t fight a revolution to replace King George III with King George (Washington) I.

The Early State Constitutions and the Articles of Confederation

Following from these colonial experiences, the American people chose to craft early state constitutions with weak Governors. For instance, by 1787, only two states provided the Governor with a role in the legislative process. New York allowed its Governor to sit on a council of revision to review laws passed by the state legislature. And only the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780—authored primarily by John Adams—granted the Governor a veto over state legislation akin to the one eventually written into the U.S. Constitution. In contrast, eleven states refused to grant their Governors this power.

In addition, most states left the selection of their Governors to the state legislature, not popular election by the state’s voters. Most Governors were constrained by executive councils selected by someone else. The vast majority of states—ten, in all—limited the Governor’s term to one year, and many Southern state required some sort of rotation in office—either banning reelection bids altogether or limiting Governors to serving three consecutive terms. The longest gubernatorial term at the time was three years.

Turning to the national level, the Confederation Congress had no separate executive branch. And while it did formally have someone called a “president,” that person was simply a delegate “appointed to preside” over Congress. The president had to be a member of Congress, and he had none of the important powers that we associate with the American presidency today. He had no power to appoint officers or judges, no veto power over congressional legislation, no power to command the military, and no power to pardon. In fact, it’s probably most useful to think of the president’s role under the Articles of Confederation as similar to the Vice President’s formal role as presiding officer in the Senate today—more like an “honorary chair” than someone holding important practical power over the lawmaking process.

With this background in mind, let’s turn now to the Convention story. How did we get Article II and the U.S. Presidency as enshrined in the Constitution?

An Overview of the Debates Over the Presidency at the Constitutional Convention

At the Constitutional Convention, the framers offered a range of opinions about the presidency.

Some framers – like James Wilson, Alexander Hamilton, and John Dickinson – favored a strong executive branch led by a single president. For these framers and their allies, a single, strong president would promote good governance, serve as America’s voice on the world stage, check Congress when it went astray, and remain accountable to the American people.
However, other key framers like Roger Sherman disagreed. For Sherman, the national government’s new executive should serve as “nothing more than an institution for carrying the will of the Legislature into effect.” For Sherman, Congress should take the lead in the new national government, not the executive branch.

These competing visions led to a series of debates over how best to structure the presidency. Throughout the Convention, the framers grappled with four key issues:

How long the president should serve.
Whether the president should be able to run for reelection (and, if so, how many times).
How to remove a president that abuses his power.
And, finally, how to elect a president.

While no single delegate or faction won on every issue, Pennsylvania’s James Wilson was one of the key visionaries behind the American presidency as it emerged at the Convention. He’s the delegate who could most credibly lay claim to the title “Father of the American Presidency.”

The Virginia Plan

Let’s begin with the Virginia Plan. Again, the Virginia plan was a proposal crafted by James Madison and introduced near the outset of the Convention by Virginia’s Edmund Randolph. As with many other debates at the Convention, the Virginia Plan helped frame debates over the structure, powers, and duties of the executive branch.

While the Virginia Plan included a detailed account of the structure and authority of the legislative branch, it provided far fewer details about the executive branch. The bottom line is that it proposed two big things. First, the new national government should have an Executive selected by Congress to serve a single term. And second, the Executive would join together with members of the judicial branch to form a Council of Revision that would review legislation passed by Congress.

At the same time, it’s also worth noting what the Virginia Plan didn’t say. It didn’t say how long the Executive would serve. It didn’t say whether the Executive would play a role in foreign affairs or national security. And it didn’t grant the Executive any role in the appointment process. These important issues—and more—were subject to further debate at the Convention.

So, what were some of the big debates over the presidency at the Constitutional Convention?

First Debate: Should We Have a Single President?

First, the delegates had a heated debate over whether to have a single President or whether to divide the executive power between multiple people.

It’s easy to take the American Presidency—with a single President—for granted today, but the decision to go with a single President was a big deal. Many states divided executive power in some way—either by having more than one executive or placing limits on the Governor’s power through an executive council.

The strongest defender of a single executive was Pennsylvania’s James Wilson. On the Convention floor, Wilson argued forcefully “that the Executive consist of a single person.” Two important delegates then jumped in to attack Wilson’s vision. Connecticut’s Roger Sherman urged the Convention to leave the structure of the executive branch—and the details of presidency—to Congress. In turn, Edmund Randolph warned the delegates that “unity in the Executive magistracy” (so, a single President) was “the foetus of monarchy.”

But Wilson didn’t back down. In response, he argued that a single President—if designed in the right way—would combine some of the advantages of a powerful king (like “energy” and “dispatch”) with “responsibility” (in other words, checks by Congress and the American people).

Wilson eventually won this debate, and the delegates agreed to an executive branch headed by an energetic, single President.

Second Debate: How Long Should the President Serve, and Should the President Be Allowed to Run for Reelection?

Second, the delegates debated the length of the President’s term and whether to impose term limits on the President.

The Constitution sets the President’s term at four years and allows the President to run for reelection. However, the delegates considered a variety of options during the Convention. For instance, in July 1787, the delegates set the President’s term at six years and prohibited him from running for reelection. So, that’s a longer term than today with the President limited to one term in office.

This decision signaled that the delegates were open to the President serving longer than the Governors that held office at the state level. As a reminder, the longest gubernatorial term at the time was three years, and most Governors were elected to terms of a single year. The delegates wanted to ensure that they created a President who was powerful enough to check Congress and served long enough to gain the experience to do the job well.

The delegates also debated presidential term limits. Some delegates—like Virginia’s George Mason—strongly supported them. On the Convention floor, Mason argued that it was “the very palladium of Civil liberty, that the general officers of State, and particularly the executive, should at fixed periods return to that mass from which they were first taken, in order that they may feel & respect those rights & interests, which are again to be personally valuable to them.” With this argument, Mason was expressing strong support for the principle of rotation in office. Mason’s views must not have been a surprise to his fellow delegates. He had already written the principle of rotation in office into the Virginia Declaration of Rights. However, Mason’s argument didn’t go unanswered.

In response, opponents of presidential term limits—like Roger Sherman and Rufus King—thought that it was valuable to allow the President to run for reelection. That would ensure accountability at the ballot box, and it would also allow effective Presidents to serve longer in office. who saw eligibility for reelection as valuable. Echoing Sherman, King argued, “He who has proved himself to be most fit for Office, ought not to be excluded by the constitution from holding it.”

In the end, the delegates agreed on a four-year term for the President, with no presidential term limits.

Third Debate: How Should We Elected the President?

Third, the delegates debated how to elect a President. Over time, the framers debated a range of ways to select the president, including direct election by popular vote (James Wilson’s preference), by members of Congress (the preference of many framers), by state governors (Elbridge Gerry’s idea), or by an electoral college (a compromise).

Until near the end of the Convention, the framers were vexed by the election of the president. Each potential solution seemed to have its own tradeoffs.

For many framers, election by Congress represented the best solution. This method left the selection of the president to some of the nation’s most respected and knowledgeable leaders. However, this solution was far from perfect. Some framers feared that this approach would lead to self-dealing by the nation’s elite. For instance, Gouverneur Morris feared that congressional election of the president might devolve into the “work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction.” Rather than serving as an independent check on Congress, the president would instead become a mere tool of his supporters in Congress.
James Wilson proposed election of the president by popular vote. This method had the obvious advantage of rooting the president’s legitimacy in popular sovereignty. However, Wilson’s proposal wasn’t popular with the delegates at the Convention.

For some framers, their opposition to the popular election of the president was driven by sheer elitism. They feared that the American people didn’t have the wisdom to choose the best president and that, instead, they might be seduced into supporting demagogues. However, that wasn’t the only – or even the most widely held – critique of Wilson’s proposal.

Many other framers didn’t so much fear the wisdom of the American people as the practical challenge of ordinary Americans selecting a single president from such a large nation in the late 1700s. At the founding, few Americans left their own local communities – let alone their states. They knew very little about what was happening outside of their communities or, at most, their own states. How could the framers expect the average American voter to know anything about an out-of-state candidate’s record – and, especially, his character? These delegates feared that a national popular vote would force the American people to choose between candidates largely unknown to them. For these delegates, the main problem with Wilson’s proposal wasn’t one of popular wisdom, but instead one of public information. In this view, the core concern was that the American people would rely on bad information when voting on a president.

The third—and final—key idea was the Electoral College. This method had the advantage of bolstering the president’s role as an independent check on Congress. Unlike congressional election of the president, the Electoral College would provide the president with his own independent base of support outside of Congress – a base of support that would gather to vote for president and then disappear once that task was done. On the flip side, some framers worried about the logistics and expenses associated with arranging for the electors to get together to vote. Others wondered about the quality of the potential electors, fearing that the Electoral College wouldn’t be able to secure electors “of the 1st or even the 2nd grade in the States.”

Late in the Convention, the delegates settled on the Electoral College as a compromise between those who supported congressional election of the President and those who supported a role for the American people in selecting a President. Over time, the Electoral College has remained in place, but within this system (and beginning in our nation’s earliest years), the American people have played a key role in presidential elections.

Fourth Debate: Should the President Play a Role in the Lawmaking Process?

Fourth, the delegates debated whether the President should play a role in the legislative process—providing some sort of formal check on Congress.

Drawing on the Virginia Plan, James Madison urged his colleagues to support a Council of Revision. In Madison’s proposal, the President would join with members of the federal judiciary to form a Council of Revision, which would have the power to review new congressional legislation and decide whether to veto it on either constitutional or policy grounds. Madison’s proposal proved unpopular with the delegates.

Instead, the delegates coalesced around a proposal by Massachusetts’s Elbridge Gerry to grant the President a formal veto over congressional legislation, but also to allow Congress to override the President's veto. Critics of Madison’s proposal like Gerry and Rufus King argued that Madison’s Council of Revision would grant judges an inappropriate role in the legislative process—creating a potential conflict of interest if they were called upon to review a challenge to the law in court. In King’s view, judges wouldn’t be able to serve their proper judicial function “free from the bias of having participated in its formation.”

At the same time, Alexander Hamilton and James Wilson countered with a proposal to grant the President an absolute veto over congressional legislation—in other words, a veto that Congress would have no power to override. However, this proposal also proved unpopular with the delegates. Only Hamilton, Wilson, and King supported it.

In the end, the delegates agreed to Gerry’s proposal by a wide margin, 8 to 2. So, the Constitution would grant the President an independent veto. At the same time, it also reserved to Congress the power to override the President’s veto with a two-thirds vote by both the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.

Final Debate: How Might We Remove a President from Office?

Finally, the delegates debated proposals for removing a President from office before the end of his term. Eventually, they settled on the process of impeachment and removal.

In July, the delegates supported a proposal for the impeachment and removal power that was broader than the one that they eventually enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. This proposal allowed Congress to impeach and remove a President for “mal Practice or Neglect of Duty.” This broad language would have extended beyond abuses of power and could have included charges of incompetence.

From there, the Committee of Detailed narrowed Congress’s impeachment and removal power to “Treason or Bribery or Corruption.”

In the end, the delegates finally settled on the following list: “Treason, Bribery, or other High Crimes and Misdemeanors.”

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