The Republic of Virtue. F. H. Buckley
and political parties without fear of intimidation or harassment. But when the money is paid into the official’s pockets, that changes things, and a bribery charge properly applies if pay-for-play is promised or given.
• While they can give useful information about proposed rules to overworked congressional staffers, lobbyists should be barred from leveraging their influence through campaign contributions and fundraising for elected officials.
• Lobbyists should not be permitted to “capture” a legislator or congressional staffer with the promise of a high-paying job after he leaves government. To prevent this practice, a Chinese Wall should be erected between lobbying and legislating to close off the revolving door between the two activities.
And that’s it. The existing set of contribution limits and disclosure requirements should be repealed. As we’ll see, they haven’t done anything except make our government more corrupt.
We needn’t tolerate America’s mediocre ranking on cross-country measures of government integrity if we can do something about it. But the optimal level of corruption is not zero, for achieving it would require a Robespierre to weed out those who fail to live up to the most exacting standards of republican virtue. Nor should we subscribe to the sociological fallacy which supposes that pathologies such as corruption can be attributed entirely to deep and immutable social causes. If culture matters, so do the legal rules and institutions that shape our culture and behavior. To understand America’s problems with corruption, we’ll look more closely at some of those institutions, beginning with the most fundamental one of all, the Constitution.
If the Legislature elect, it will be the work of intrigue, of cabal, and of faction.
—Gouverneur Morris
IN 1789, Thomas Jefferson returned from Paris to become America’s first secretary of state. As neither he nor President Washington wanted entangling alliances with other countries, he would have time on his hands, but soon he became something more than a cabinet member. He also led a growing political movement that was troubled by a centralizing Federalist Party. Jefferson’s party came to be called Democratic-Republicans, and he would run as their candidate for president in 1796 and win the highest office in 1800.
In Paris, Jefferson had witnessed the eruption of the French Revolution—the Tennis Court Oath, the storming of the Bastille, the Declaration of the Rights of Man. He returned “in the fervor of natural rights, and zeal for reformation” to what seemed to him a sadly conservative country.1 In France the aristocracy had lost its feudal privileges, but in postrevolutionary America a new hereditary aristocracy appeared to be emerging around the Society of the Cincinnati’s officer class. Writing from France, Jefferson warned Washington that so much as a single fiber of the society left in existence “will produce an hereditary aristocracy which will change the form of our governments from the best to the worst in the world.”2 There was also a rising moneyed aristocracy, based in New York and Philadelphia, composed of urban merchants whom the agrarian Democratic-Republicans saw as their natural enemy. The new financial class was led by Washington’s brilliant but imprudent secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who would shortly become a leader of the High Federalists and Jefferson’s principal opponent.
Jefferson was dismayed to find himself surrounded by monarchists in Hamilton’s New York, the new country’s capital. “I cannot describe the wonder and mortification with which the table conversation filled me. Politics was the chief topic, and a preference for kingly, over republican, government was evidently the favored sentiment.”3 The country was already abandoning the republican principles of its founding, and some people hankered for a return to court government, with its attendant corruption.
Jefferson also objected to the federal assumption of state public debt, which Hamilton had negotiated in 1790. Southern republicans weren’t happy with how this measure was shifting the locus of financial power from the states to the federal government. Worse, those being paid off weren’t the farmer-patriots who had purchased state-issued bonds during the revolution. These bonds had mostly been sold off to a set of “speculators” and “stock-jobbers” who bought them at deep discount. The federal assumption of the debt was nothing other than a bailout of Hamilton’s friends, a moneyed class of wealthy investors (not unlike the 2008–9 bailout of Wall Street by another treasury secretary). What Hamilton’s scheming came down to, said Jefferson, was monarchism, and not just the desire for a king but “a monarchy bottomed on corruption.”
Corruption was a favorite topic for Jefferson, and he returned to it at a private dinner with Hamilton and John Adams in 1791. He wasn’t especially inclined to socialize with either of them, but Washington had left for Mount Vernon and had asked his cabinet and his vice president to deal with important matters that might arise during his absence. So the three met over dinner, and after the tablecloth was removed and the port produced, the conversation drifted to general matters. The Anglophile Adams praised the British constitution. Could it only be purged of its corruption, he said, it would be “the most perfect constitution ever devised by the wit of man.” For Jefferson that was anathema: Britain was so corrupt that nothing could save it. Then Hamilton spoke up. Corruption was inseparable from what he admired in the British constitution. “Purge it of its corruption, and give to its popular branch equality of representation, & it would become an impracticable government,” he said, but “as it stands at present, with all its supposed defects, it is the most perfect government which ever existed.”4
Among the Framers, Hamilton wasn’t alone in his admiration for the British form of government. At the Philadelphia Convention, many of the other delegates had gone out of their way to praise the British constitution. But they had just fought a revolution to free themselves from it, and they wanted something better for America. Theirs would be a different kind of constitution, an anticorruption covenant.
The crucial moment in American history was not the Revolutionary War but the Philadelphia Convention of 1787, when fifty-five delegates from twelve states assembled to frame a new constitution for the country. (Rhode Island sent no delegates.) It may now seem inevitable that the delegates would agree on a constitution, but at various points in the proceedings they were at full stop. Several of the delegates threatened to walk out, and not a few thought the country might split into two or three parts.5 In that case, said Gouverneur Morris of Pennsylvania, they should prepare for civil war. “The Country must be united,” he warned. “If persuasion does not unite us, the sword will. . . . The stronger party will then make traytors of the weaker; and the Gallows and Halter will finish the work of the sword.” Moreover, foreign powers might have been happy to take advantage of the confusion.6 A formal return to the British Empire, with a right of American self-government, was not beyond the realm of possibility, in which case the revolution would have been undone.
Even after the delegates agreed on the new Constitution, on September 17, it still had to be ratified by the states. But the outcome was then in little doubt, because the Framers presented the states with a take-it-or-leave-it document. It would be this or nothing, and the second option was not in the cards, since remaining under the Articles of Confederation might have resulted in a breakup of the new country. In the end, even corrupt little Rhode Island came around and ratified the Constitution in May 1790, a year after George Washington had been inaugurated as the first president. The state may have