Federalist 70: How to Assess the Performance of a President

I want to clear up a common, and highly destructive, American misunderstanding about the president.

To start, take a moment and answer the following questions for yourself:

1. What factors do you consider when judging whether or not a president has done a good job?
2. What factors do you consider when you decide which presidential candidate to vote for?
3. When the presidential candidates campaign, what kinds of issues do they talk about and what kinds of issues do you want them to talk about?

Thought about your answers?

Good. Now, let’s think about these questions in terms of an average cashier.

Thought Experiment

If you were assessing the job performance of a cashier at a restaurant, what factors would you consider? Would you take into account their dishwashing ability or their cooking ability?

Probably not. Why?

Because neither of those activities are part of the cashier’s job description.

So, an outside viewer would question your skill as interviewer if you heard all of the irrelevant skills and considered them pertinent and influenced your decision to hire the individual.

Make sense? So, consider the three questions above when thinking about any individual operating in any job position.

1. What factors do you consider when judging whether a not the individual has done a good job?
2. What factors do you consider when you decide which job candidate to hire?
3. When asking questions in an interview, what kinds of talents does the job candidate talk about and what kinds of talents do you want to hear about?

As It Pertains to the President

Friends, when it comes to the president, most Americans are highly incompetent job interviewers and assessors.

Consider Hamilton’s words from Federalist 70. In his paper, he argues for an active, vibrant single executor of law and further emphasizes the important role of the executor. He says, “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government. A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.”

So, the executive should be an energetic individual, active in the execution of the laws that the legislature has, with deliberation and wisdom, written. This energetic execution of law is the executive’s job.

Let’s look at the work execute. It means: “Literally, to follow out or through. Hence, to perform; to do; to effect; to carry into complete effect; to complete; to finish. We execute a purpose, a plan, design or scheme; we execute a work undertaken, that is, we pursue it to the end.”

Hmmm, good to know. Further, what does the Constitution say about the president’s job? His job is to see the the laws be faithfully executed. So, his job is to see that the laws are “carried into complete effect; to finish; to pursue to an end”.

Assessing the President

So, when you assess the job of a sitting president, what do you consider? My guess is, you probably consider the economy, immigration, laws of various kinds, the handling of natural disasters or crisis, taxes, etc.

Am I right?

Do you ever consider analyzing how well he’s done his job? Do you consider how well he’s seen to it that the laws be faithfully executed or that he’s handled treaties and appointments well?

But Americans never seem to assess the president on his job but rather the legislatives’ job. Think about all of the promises that presidential candidates make when running for president. Close to 99% of their promises have to do with issues about which the president has no control.

And yet, we vote for the president based off of the fallacious notion that voting for a president who promises to do things only the legislature can do, will somehow result in a president who does what only the legislature can do. It’s no wonder that every president has let us down when finally in office. He made promises about things that were not in his job description in the first place and we judge him off of a job description that is not his.

Hamilton’s Take in Federalist 70

Hamilton spends the bulk of Federalist 70 working to dispel the notion that the executive power should be paired with a council or should be broken up between two individuals. He argues vehemently against this notion, his primary argument the following: it would dramatically decrease our ability to judge the performance of the executive. Hamilton says: “But one of the weightiest objections to a plurality in the Executive, and which lies as much against the last as the first plan, is, that it tends to conceal faults and destroy responsibility.”

Hamilton argues that “the ingredients which constitute energy in the Executive are, first, unity; secondly, duration; thirdly, an adequate provision for its support; fourthly, competent powers.” His primary focus for the article is the support of a unified executive. In other words, he argues that all of the power to execute law should reside in one man, not many men or a counsel of men. There need not be deliberation amongst multiple executives about how to execute the law. Such deliberation would cause delay and severely weaken the government while also making it far more difficult to assign blame or hold an executive responsible for failure to execute the laws faithfully.

I challenge you, my readers, to take a hard look at how you assess presidents or presidential candidates. Do you ask yourself, “How well did the president execute the law?” and judge him based off of the answer to that question? Or do you assess him by a variety of other actions that really have nothing to do with his job as president?

You see, we have to get away from ascribing to the president more power than he possesses, because in doing so, we convince other Americans that his job is more than it is while providing the president the perfect excuse to take on more power than he is Constitutionally allowed to possess.

It’s our job to be both the educated interviewer and the educated job assessor of our presidents. We should approach such a job soberly and assess the president by his actual job description.

Hamilton says, near the end of Federalist 70, “I clearly concur in opinion, in this particular, with a writer whom the celebrated Junius pronounces to be ‘deep, solid, and ingenious,’‘ that `the executive power is more easily confined when it is ONE‘; that it is far more safe there should be a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people; and, in a word, that all multiplication of the Executive is rather dangerous than friendly to liberty.”

In other words, implicit in this statement is the expectation that the people will be watchful over the executive to make sure that he does his job correctly. And the power of the executive is unified and given to one individual so that we are able to more easily assess how well this individual fulfills such a role.

But, we have to be educated enough to know and understand what such a role entails before we can judge, punish and vote accordingly.

The Liberty Belle