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legislatures. No state, no representatives. And as for
senators, they would not be selected by the president (as Hamilton, following the model of the British House of Lords, would have preferred) or
by the lower house of Congress (as Madison and the Virginia nationalists
proposed), but were to be chosen by the state legislatures.
    Madison was very unhappy that the new Congress, like the old ones,
would be federal, not national. He confided to Thomas Jefferson on October 24, 1787, that he feared the ongoing state role in federal policymaking meant that the new government would be too responsive to the
people's whims. This new government would be inadequate to nationalist aims, just as the old one had been. (Madison had also broached the
idea that Congress should be empowered to sic the U.S. Navy on states
that did not comply with national commands. The Convention rejected
that idea too.)

    Legal Latinisms
    Veto: Latin for "I forbid." A refusal by the
president or a governor to sign into law a
bill that has been passed by a legislature.
Unlike the British royal veto, American
vetoes can be overridden by supermajority vote.

    There were other provisions displeasing to the monarchist-nationalist
coalition as well. Instead of saying "Congress may legislate as it will" or
"Congress may legislate in any area to which it considers the states
incompetent," the final Constitution carefully hedged congressional
power.
    In Article I, Section 8 the draft Constitution included a list of congressional powers. Virtually all of them were related to foreign affairs and
trade. They were also few and provided little wiggle room for expansion.
And in the course of the ratification dispute of 1787-1788, Federalists
from north to south promised to take a tightly constricted view of constitutional interpretation.
    The judiciary article of the Constitution also lived up to the hopes of
the delegates favoring a federal over a national structure. Instead of giving
federal courts power to hear any cases Congress wanted them to hear (that
is, cases "affecting the national peace and harmony"), as the HamiltonMadison, monarchist-nationalist coalition had proposed, the Convention
restricted federal courts' jurisdiction in two ways. First, the Constitution
did not require that there be any federal trial courts at all. In fact, Madison would promise in the ratification debate in Virginia that the new government would try to get along without them. Only if that experiment
failed, he said, would federal trial courts be created.
    The Constitution also provided a list of the kinds of cases Congress
might authorize federal courts to decide-which meant, as lawyers
understood things in those days, that Congress could not authorize federal courts to decide any other kinds of cases. Instead of a national
judiciary, in other words-one with power to hear any case that came to
hand-Article III created a federal judiciary and left most judicial power
in the state governments.

    Portrait of a Patriot

    James Madison (1751-1836) played a major role in assembling the Philadelphia
Convention but had a checkered constitutional record thereafter. In the Convention, Madison attempted to create a national, instead of federal, government with military power to attack states that did not comply with federal mandates, a Congress
with unlimited legislative powers and a veto on state legislation, and courts with unlimited jurisdiction. He soon knuckled under to Virginian pressure for amendments, but he intentionally provided
amendments without serious effect. As a congressman, he enunciated a strict constructionist reading
of the Constitution in 1791, but he flip-flopped on congressional authority to charter banks in 1816.
His Bonus Bill Veto Message (1817) sounded like the Madison of 1791, as did his criticism of Marshall's
McCulloch v. Maryland decision, but his confused response to nullification was both disingenuous
and destructive. Madison was