The topic of this episode is, “Was James Madison the first majority leader?”
Both the Senate and the House of Representatives have a majority leader. At the time of the recording this podcast, Republican John Thune of South Dakota is the Senate majority leader, and Republican Steve Scalise of Louisiana is the House majority leader.
Now, congressional scholars tend to argue that the majority leader emerged as a position in each chamber in 1899. Democrat Arthur B Gorman of Maryland was the first Senate majority leader, and Republican Sereno Elisha Payne of New York was the first House majority leader.
My AEI colleague Jay Cost has a different view. He thinks the first majority leader appeared on Capitol Hill far earlier, and it was Virginia’s James Madison. So, we’re going to discuss that claim, which you can find in his recent piece, “Icons of Congress: James Madison — The First Majority Leader.”
So, we’re going to discuss that claim.
Dr. Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford nonresident senior fellow at AEI and the author of the superb book, James Madison: America’s First Politician (2021), and other fine volumes on politics and history. Regular readers of UnderstandingCongress.org no doubt have seen Jay’s various reports and essays, and if you have not seen them, do have a look.
Kevin Kosar:
Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution, and few Americans think well of it. But Congress is essential to our republic. It is a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be.
And that is why we are here: to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I am your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington DC.
Jay, welcome to the podcast.
Jay Cost:
Thank you so much for having me, Kevin. It’s a pleasure to be here.
Kevin Kosar:
Let’s start by defining terms. What is a majority leader in Congress, and how does that person get picked?
Jay Cost:
The majority leader in the Senate is the head of the majority party in the Senate. They’re responsible for managing the floor agenda and they’re also responsible for ultimately managing the party coalition to achieve legislative victory on the floor. In other words, his job is to get the party’s agenda passed to the great ex extent possible, and relatedly to prevent the other party from cracking the majority party by getting something in the minority’s position passed.
Now in the House it’s a little different because the leader of the House for the majority party is also the Speaker of the House. The Speaker is a constitutional role, but it sort of has emerged as the leader of the majority coalition.
Nevertheless, the House also has a majority leader who sort of functions similar to the leader in the Senate, but is ultimately responsive to the speaker.
These jobs are elected by party coalition, so the Republican conference elects all their officers: the majority leader, the whip, etc. The Democratic caucus, when it’s in the majority, does the same thing. So to get that position requires from the earliest moments in Congress to sort of move into a leadership track and to have won a broad support of your coalition within Congress. So you have to be a people person among people people.
Kevin Kosar:
Our friends in the Historian’s Office of the House of Representatives helpfully explain that the majority leader, “is charged with scheduling legislation for floor consideration; planning the daily, weekly, and annual legislative agendas; consulting with Members to gauge party sentiment; and, generally working to advance the goals of the majority party.”
So this is not a position written into the US Constitution, as Speaker of the House is, for example. Article I, Section 2 declares, “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers.” Yet, very early in the Republic James Madison played that yet-to-be-named role of “majority leader.” When did he take office and how did he take up this role? And which majority did he lead?
Jay Cost:
It’s an interesting story, not just for the history but also when you think about Congress as an institution—a series of rules and procedures that have been formalized.
Nothing was formalized at that time. The majority leader position was formally established in like 1899. Before that, the de facto majority leader in the house would be the chair of the Ways and Means Committee. And in the Senate, the chair of the Senate Finance Committee was the de facto majority leader.
What’s interesting to me about this story is that you imagine being elected to Congress today, you have to go to a seminar and take a crash course on how Congress works. Every new Congress, the House adopts new rules. There’s the standing rules of the Senate. There’s all these rules.
When the first Congress is seated in the spring of 1789, there’s nothing. There’s certainly tradition and holdover stuff from the Continental Congress, but there’s nothing by way of actual institutional mechanisms. The flip side of this is if you look at the history of John Adams as the president of the Senate, Adams thinks that he could transform his role as president of the Senate into a meaningful position. And he, of course, failed.
Anyway, Madison is elected to the first Congress from his home county of Orange. He’s the representative of the Fifth District of Virginia, and the first Congress convenes and there’s nothing by way of procedures or rules or anything like that. And so Madison just sort of emerges as a de facto majority leader, and I would say probably for two reasons.
The first one is he was just really hardworking. The subtitle of my biography on Madison was “America’s First Politician.” And by that, I meant that he is a professional man of politics. He didn’t have a separate business venture. He was 100% devoted to politics, which is very different than a lot of most other politicians at the time. And also he’s just a workaholic and just to his unbelievably vast, probing, searching intellect, being dedicated to political questions all the time. He had an extraordinary capacity for work at a very high level, so he’s got that going for him.
The other thing that he has going for him at that point is that he has sort of emerged as one of the main members of Washington’s brain trust, which at this point is made up of James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. So Madison really has the confidence of Washington, and in fact basically writes much of Washington’s inaugural address. This is also ironic because Madison is this champion of checks and balances in Federalist 51, but in the First Congress, he’s sort of a mix between an American House majority leader and a British Prime Minister where he’s facilitating Washington’s agenda within the House of Representatives.
Kevin Kosar:
And at this point in time, were there declared parties within Congress yet? Were there proto-parties developing, or was this just a case where you had elected representatives from different parts of the country who did not know one another, and Madison was the glue to create coordination within the chamber and across the branches?
Jay Cost:
There certainly were not formal parties. I like to date the start of party politics, to the introduction of Alexander Hamilton’s financial plan in 1790, because you can see the threads that are the beginning of the through line of the Jeffersonian/Federalist divide.
In terms of party organization, I would say you don’t really see anything until 1791 or 1792. In 1791, you get the first Jeffersonian newspaper; in 1792, you begin to see the Jeffersonians coordinate to remove John Adams from the vice presidency. That being said, there was a coalition. You could call it Federalist, but you have to be careful with your terminology here because Federalist becomes the Hamiltonian Coalition. This is more Federalist in the Federalist Papers coalition. So you could call it the Pro-Constitution Party. You could call it the Pro-Administration Party. But there is a definite coalition of members in both chambers who are looking to strengthen the national government. So that would distinguish Madison from someone like Richard Henry Lee, who was a senator from Virginia—he would be an anti administration or anti-Federalists member in the Senate. He’s been selected by the anti-Federalists faction or coalition that’s in charge of the Virginia House of Delegates. So that would be an example, I would say.
Now that being said, I would add that the Pro-Administration or Federalist coalition at this time is really large. The debate over ratification of the Constitution had been pretty closely fought into 1788, but at the end the country was sort of like, “Yeah, okay, we’re done.” So for instance, Patrick Henry, an anti-Federalist, had tried to keep James Madison out of Congress by gerrymandering—even though the phrase hadn’t been invented yet—Madison’s district to include a bunch of anti-Federalists counties in it. Madison still won with like 57% of the vote, which is a sign that a broad majority of citizens were like, “Let’s give this government a shot.” So the coalition that Madison is handling in Congress is the coalition of the people who are earnestly committed to giving a fair test to the Constitution.
And so the agenda items are going to be things like creating the courts and creating the executive departments and—above all—creating an impost, or a tax. This is why—ironically for how important it’s become—Madison had to basically cajole the House of Representatives into adopting the Bill of Rights.
The Bill of Rights had been something that anti-Federalists had demanded, and it was something that George Mason, even at the Constitutional Convention, was like, “Hey, we need a Bill of Rights.” That was sort of an informal, gentlemanly compromise after Virginia ratified between moderate anti-Federalists and Federalists. So Madison tries to act on this promise, but he gets pushback because the House wants to deal with the other agenda items. And Madison basically hounds them until they finally agree to do the classic move of members of Congress—they created a select committee to have them figure it out. So that’s how the Bill of Rights gets written. It’s very ironic. If you’re looking for some great philosophical debate in the First Congress on the Bill of Rights, you’re not going to find it because it’s not there.
Kevin Kosar:
What years was Madison in Congress? Was Madison ever challenged as majority leader, or did he act as minority leader?
Jay Cost:
Madison was in the First, Second, and Third Congresses, and he was gone by 1797. He married Dolly in 1794, and I think he was just burned out at that point. And importantly, what happened was—and I mentioned this a little bit ago—Alexander Hamilton in the winter of 1790 introduces the first part of his finance program on how to deal with the national debt. Madison is opposed to the whole program top to bottom, so he opposes Hamilton and becomes a kind of minority leader because the numbers on the finance program are evenly split, but favor Hamilton.
Madison thinks—and Jefferson thinks—that the reason Hamilton gets key parts of his program across the finish line is because it’s very good for members of Congress and because they own government debt. So it’s sort of a parallel to today, where people are really agitated about members trading stock in 2025. That was the private concern of Madison and Jefferson. They had a list of members who were invested in public government certificates that they showed to Washington, and showed him that they were the ones who made the difference in Hamilton’s economic program.
Madison opposes that. He opposes the Bank of the United States. He tries to get Hamilton impeached in 1792 into 1793—he tries to get Hamilton removed. And then after the execution of Louis XVI in 1793, Britain and France go to war. Madison is going to be on the opposite side of the Washington Administration on that. And Hamilton is going to very cleverly identify Madison in Washington’s mind with a partisan opposition to Washington, so Madison basically gets bounced from Washington’s inner circle, but then also no longer managing the majority coalition in the House.
In some respects, that power migrates to Hamilton and other members of Congress like Jeremiah Wadsworth and a few others.
Kevin Kosar:
So in a very short time, Madison went from gaining the backing of the majority and being allied with the administration to being a loyal opposition figure, in part because there were these clear sectional economic and other interests that were there in Congress, but had not crystallized under party labels.
Jay Cost:
Yeah. You could think of it too as, in 1789, the big question in Congress was a related series of questions about the central government—Do we strengthen it? What do we do to strengthen it? But in 1790, the debate shifts from “Do we strengthen the government?” to, “We have this strong central government. To what purposes should we direct it?” That is where Madison and Hamilton disagreed.
And the subject of my dissertation was responding to this perception of a lot of people that Madison changed his mind or that he got sort of bewitched by Thomas Jefferson because Jefferson came back from France. But if you look at Madison’s political ideas that existed before, Hamilton’s financial program was always something he wasn’t going to like.
And Hamilton is such an interesting character in American history because he emerges in 1790 and he is not even aware that he’s doing it. He takes the entire political debate and refocuses it around himself. And like Madison, does it because he’s insanely hardworking and he’s capable of genius on a level that is hardly imaginable. It’s hard to conceive of people like operating on the same level as a Hamilton. Hamilton re-centers the debate around himself, pushes Madison into the minority, and begins this crazy decade in American politics of the 1790s that is as crazy as our politics is today. I always tell people, “If you think the two sides hate each other, you should look at the 1790.” Both sides were convinced that the others were acting on behalf of a foreign power—that Jefferson was the tool of the French and that Hamilton wanted a British monarchy. It’s just crazy.
Kevin Kosar:
Did Madison, as a majority leader, have policies that he thought were important and wanted to coordinate people in the chamber to build a majority so that these things could advance forward? You mentioned that Bill of Rights was something that he shepherded through. A revenue bill was part of it as well. Another big thing for him was building executive departments. Are there other things that were Madison-preferred policies that he brought people around to get over the line?
Jay Cost:
In 1789, those were the big three that Madison was really sort of shepherding in the House. The fourth one was the Judiciary Act of 1789. It’s interesting because nowadays we usually think of the House and the Senate are both policymaking institutions, but for the most part, in 1789, the Senate did not conceive of itself as a policymaking institution. For instance, what happened with the impost and then with the executive departments and the Bill of Rights was the House originates them and then they go on to the Senate to be revised and then back to the House. The exception to that was the Judiciary Act, which is a product of Oliver Ellsworth in the Senate.
But those three things take up most of the period of time. The one that he was trying to do by the end of the session and did not manage to do was convince members to move the Capitol southward because the capitol was placed temporarily in New York, which had also been the seat of the Continental Congress. But when the Constitution called for a permanent capital, the question was, “Where was this going to be?” Madison wanted it to be in the center of the country. He wanted it to be near Virginia, which also is in the center of the country. This was an example, I think, of something where there was no obvious coalition in favor of that in 1789 because every mile that it’s moved southward, northern members lose, and every mile that it’s moved northward, southern members lose. So there was really no compromise on that. They had been fighting about moving it to maybe the Susquehanna River in present-day Pennsylvania, but that gets left until 1790.
Jefferson recounts that that was part of a final deal cut over Hamilton’s debt program, although there are reasons to doubt that that’s why the deal was actually cut to move Washington where it is. So if you’re ever in Washington in August and you hate the heat, you can thank James Madison and Thomas Jefferson for putting you in a swamp.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you, Jay, for taking to chat with us about the position of majority leader and about James Madison’s time spent leading his party in Congress.
Jay Cost:
Thank you, Kevin. It was great to be here.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Jaehun Lee and hosted by Kevin Kosar. You can subscribe to Understanding Congress via Stitcher, iTunes, Google Podcasts, and TuneIn. We hope you will share this podcast with others and tell us what you think about it by posting your thoughts and questions on Twitter and tagging at AEI. Once again, thank you for listening, and have a great day.
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