A Most Unsure Grip: Choice IV

Abstract

This chapter “A Most Unsure Grip: Choice IV” focuses on the Framers final critical decision regarding the allocation of power—the design and structure of the executive branch. For all our focus on James Madison’s brilliance as a strategist and political thinker, as well as the careful design and arrangement of the system, the executive branch is one area in which his otherwise keen abilities seemed to have faltered and ultimately failed him. Like many of his fellow delegates, he was torn between the need to empower the federal government under the executive branch and the need to protect liberty by ensuring against tyranny. Madison’s uncertainty regarding the construction of Article II played out at the Convention as the delegates struggled to come to an agreement on everything from the number of executives the state should have to issues regarding the presidents’ tenure, term, selection, and powers. As James MacGregor Burns writes, what is astounding is that the US Constitution is often used as an “example of audacious and effective political planning”—yet when it comes to “its most creative element, the Presidency” that was the one area “on which the Framers’ grip was most unsure.” We are still living with the results of the Framers discomfort regarding how to construct and empower an executive in a democratic republic today.