Civics In A Year
What do you really know about American government, the Constitution, and your rights as a citizen?
Civics in a Year is a fast-paced podcast series that delivers essential civic knowledge in just 10 minutes per episode. Over the course of a year, we’ll explore 250 key questions—from the founding documents and branches of government to civil liberties, elections, and public participation.
Rooted in the Civic Literacy Curriculum from the Center for American Civics at Arizona State University, this series is a collaborative project supported by the School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership. Each episode is designed to spark curiosity, strengthen constitutional understanding, and encourage active citizenship.
Whether you're a student, educator, or lifelong learner, Civics in a Year will guide you through the building blocks of American democracy—one question at a time.
Civics In A Year
Why America Has One President: Federalist No. 70 Explained
Dr. Beienberg explains Alexander Hamilton's arguments in Federalist No. 70 for establishing a single executive rather than a council or committee to lead the executive branch. Hamilton's case rests on the fundamental differences between legislative and executive power, with the former benefiting from diverse voices and the latter requiring efficiency and clear accountability.
• Executive power demands unity for efficiency and clear accountability
• Multiple executives create internal division and blame-shifting
• The Roman consul system showed the disadvantages of divided executive authority
• The British monarchy used councils to deflect blame from the king
• The American presidency is designed to be clearly accountable to the people, unlike a hereditary monarch
• Hamilton's vision emphasizes knowing exactly who to blame for the poor execution of laws
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School of Civic and Economic Thought and Leadership
Welcome back everyone. We are continuing our deep dive into Federalist no 70, and we have Dr Beinberg back with us, and one of the questions I wanted to ask you, dr Beinberg, is you know we've talked in previous podcasts with Dr Kreese about influences that the founders had. Why does the founders had, why does Federalist 70, or how does it defend having one person in the executive as opposed?
Speaker 2:to a group of people. So this is one of the places where you see the Federalists invoking not just classical antiquity but also, in both explicitly and implicitly, the example of experience as part of the British Empire. And so the fundamental argument that they make in Federalist 70 is that if we think that executive power is fundamentally different than legislative power, we want to have a single unit the term that gets used later is unitary executive who is ultimately accountable for executing the law Again, not for making the law. Making the law, you want lots of different voices, lots of deliberation, this little messy process. But once you are executing the law or, on the foreign policy side, making sort of quick life and death decisions about deploying forces or negotiating a treaty or something like that that you want that to be a single figure. And so they make basically a sort of logical case for why this is important, which fundamentally boils down to it's efficient to execute the law and it's accountable that if the law is executed poorly, you know who to blame. That ultimately the president can't point at lackeys and say, well, my lackeys were incompetent. Well, you pick the lackeys Some of them are required to be confirmed by the Senate but you, ultimately nobody is in your cabinet, nobody is working for you, that you fundamentally object to, at least at the upper levels. It gets a little dicey where we're talking lower, lower levels of the federal bureaucracy, and that's something that I think the Supreme Court has been sort of kicking around the last few years. But at the upper level it's not that controversial on that front that these are people as Hamilton says in Federalist 70, that the president has picked.
Speaker 2:So what's the alternative to this system in which you know who the president is, you know who to blame for bad execution of the law? He says well, one model is the Raman model, where you have multiple consoles and these multiple consoles are squabbling for power. They're squabbling for blame, right? Well, they're going to each say, well, the other console made the mistakes that did this, or the other console is going to be potentially incentivized not to enforce something that was pushed by the first console, because then the first console is going to get credit for it, right? So Hamilton says you're going to get this really messy system where there's internal division, which, again, is good when you're making policy. It's bad when you're executing policy. So you're going to basically get the disadvantages of the legislature without the advantages. So we don't want that. Roman model shows us why this was a mistake.
Speaker 2:Moreover, in Federalist 7071 and 72, they point to the example of the British monarchy and, to a lesser extent, the councils which are attached to some of the governors in response to the British imperial experience. So so the example in the British imperial model or in or in some of the state governments with the governors, is that you have this council and sort of for the executive to act needs this sort of buy-in at some level from it varies based on which state and the British model but you need some sort of buy-in from the council, or the council is helping to execute the law, and this meant that governors could blame the council or, most commonly, the British monarch or the monarch's defenders could blame the council if law was executed badly or if decisions regarding the colonial experience were missed. And this is part of this, as Franklin points out at one point in the convention, is useful because no one has elected the British monarch. This is a point that Hamilton reiterates here in these Federalist Papers, right? So you sort of want the fiction of saying, yeah, the people who screwed it up are the people we can easily replace.
Speaker 2:The king is sacred, but the president isn't sacred, and you want to be able to clearly make that blame, rather than the finger pointing that they had seen in the British imperial model or you're starting to see in some of the state governments as well, where they can say well, the council stopped me from doing it, the council made me do it and so yeah, in these Federalist Papers, hamilton is pointing to recent experience in the American statehood and colonial system, as well as classical antiquity of just seeing that a truly executive institution should be accountable and clean and singular in terms of who is responsible and who ultimately is to be blamed. This might be different in an inherited monarchy, where you want to even have these little extra roadblocks, but we didn't inherit a monarchy. Someone becomes president because they were chosen by the electoral college, not because of who their father or grandfather were.
Speaker 1:Thank you, dr Byenberg. That was a very concise explanation on why there's just one president and not three or four. Thank you, quick question, yeah.
