How Congress Lost, Part VIII: Patronage and the Emergence of Senatorial Hegemony

Jay Cost, How Congress Lost, Part VIII: Patronage and the Emergence of Senatorial Hegemony, American Enterprise Institute, September 12, 2025.

This is the eighth installment of Jay Cost’s “How Congress Lost” series of short reports. Here he argues that President Andrew Jackson birthed the patronage system, wherein federal jobs and contracts would be handed out to loyal party members.

A few decades after Jackson left office patronage had distorted the constitutional system. Senators became exorbitantly powerful. “[P]atronage became the financial basis for powerful state political machines, usually helmed by senators,,” Cost writes. “Sitting at the nexus of federal and state power, they were well positioned to direct federal patronage to maximum political effect. And presidents inclined to object would do well to think twice because renomination required the acquiescence of the party convention, which was dominated by the state parties that were overseen by these very senators.”

The passage of the Pendleton Act in 1883 ended this regime, although senatorial domination continued for some years.