Like the democratic tradition, it also has ancient roots. If you think about the republican tradition, it really goes back to Aristotle's idea that every regime consists either of some version of the one, as in a monarchy, some version in the few, as an aristocracy, or some version of the many as in a democracy. And Aristotle thought the best thing to do was have elements of all three, right, that was what he called a polity. And republican thinking since Aristotle's time, time is how you combine the interests of the one, the few, and the many. And the American solution is really a version of that. And so it's a famous book called The Machiavellian Moment by a historian by the name of John Pocock, that traces this tradition, this, this republican tradition all the way back to ancient times. And we will, again, don't have time for that here. But the main feature of it, I want to point out, is that you create in, in the interest of ambition contracting ambition with any institutions, you create many veto points, veto players, ways of throw, that one person in one par, or group, in one part of the government, can check, we talk about checks and balances, right? Can check what goes on in other parts of the government. So we have a Bill of Rights. What's the Bill of Rights? >> It was a, you know, a collection of what people thought, you know, our rights were, that became the first ten amendments. >> That's right, the first ten amendments to the Constitution. And it, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, it was clear that they were needed, promising they, they were not actually added until the Cnstitution had been adopted. But Madison, in particular, had promised the Virginians and others that they would be adopted, and he pretty much wrote most of them. And he wrote them particularly from our point of view, of interest. He wrote them to be individual rights rather than states' rights. At the time people were mostly concerned about the powers of state legislatures and protecting them, and Madison resisted that and created instead a system of individual rights, like the First Amendment. We've talked about the religion clause in another context. We've that there's rights of free speech there, and association the right to bear arms you, they're a familiar list. Okay so the, the ri, the rights identified in the Bill of Rights are sort of thought of as trumps on majority decisions, right? Then they put supermajority requirements in. What, what supermajority requirements are there in the Constitution? >> Well, you, you know, you need a supermajority to override a presidential veto. >> You do, you know what it is? >> Two-thirds? >> Two-thirds in both houses, yeah. Does it ever, does it ever happen? >> I'm, I don't, I can't think of an example la, lately. >> It, it's, it's very rare that it happens. The Taft-Hartley Act in, in 1949, by cutting back on union rights was passed over a presidential veto. The sanctions against South Africa during the apartheid era in the Reagan administration were, were passed over preden, presidential veto. It's very difficult to do, to get two-thirds in both houses, probably. Not a long list, right? But there, there it is, supermajority. Any, any other supermajority requirements in the Constitution? >> I don't know. >> Well, the other big one is to amend the Constitution, right. Huge suit, you've gotta get three-quarters of, two, two-thirds in both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states in order to amend the Constitution. So, it's very hard to change the Constitution huge supermajority. The separation of powers itself is, creates veto players, right? The, the, that the different branches, we've, we've seen this most recently in the, in the Supreme Court's decision in the case, Citizen's United in 2012. Struck down various controls on, that, what corporations can spend during elections that Congress had, had tried to enact at various times. So the, the cou, court can strike down legislation passed by the majority in Congress. How often they do that varies with historical periods. In the early part of this century there was a, a lot of legislation. The New Deal, legislation passed by Franklin Roosevelt. Much of it was struck down by the Supreme Court. To the point where he actually had to threaten to pack the court an idea that he, he a goal he, he, he said I'm just going to appoint a lot more justices if you people don't stop this. And he got slapped down on that but the and he wasn't able to do it, but the court backed off eventually at that point. So there's a whole science of studying how often these, these institutions in fact challenge one another. But so that was another, i, idea that, that this is, again, getting ambition to counteract ambition. The agents of the different branches, protecting those branches against one another. And part, pa, part of the idea was if, if these people are, if these politicians are fighting so much with one another for power, they won't be tyrannizing over us, the people. Right, so that was part of that notion. Bicameralism, what's bicameralism? >> Two houses? >> Yeah, we have a House and a Senate. So legislation has to be passed by both. Particularly notable when they're in the hands of different parties, as they currently are. So the Republican House can pass all kinds of things that won't get through the Senate and vice versa. So again, that creates institutional sclerosis and some people call it checks and balances, other people call it gridlock, right? >> [LAUGH]. >> And we can, we'll talk more about which of those things it really is, yeah. And, of course, the other huge veto in the system is federalism. Federalism means, in the United States those powers that are not explicitly given to the central government remain with the states. So it's not like the national government was created and then some powers were devolved to local governments, as is the case say, in, in the UK. The, the national government devolves power to a local government, but can take it back, right? Here the, the states created the federal government and, with a list of enumerated powers. And those that are not enumerated remain with the states. So that creates all kinds of jurisdictional confrontations between the states and the federal government. Or the possibility of confrontations between the states and the federal governments, right. And so, federalism is yet another veto point. So, this was Madison's second big, on the one hand there's the theory of pluralist society, cross-cutting cleavages, and that, then he says that's not enough. You also need this system of institutions that's going to be unable to tyrannize over us. As he put it, first you have to enable the government to control the society. But then you must oblige it to control itself. Now, this is the republican theory of institutions. How democratic it is, is another matter, and that's a subject that we'll take up next time.
