Cato V, Part IX: Four Hundred and Thirty-Five Ways to Get What You Want

Private individuals and enterprises do most assuredly traffic in the kind of influence peddling to which Clinton sought to call attention in the text of Cato V, of course. He was far from mistaken in believing that the fundamentally public nature of the American model of representative government entailed a degree of vulnerability to outside interference. But whereas he and his fellow Founders tended to pinpoint the source of this intrusion as being either foreign in nature – with Great Britain in particular seen as a likely potential source of infiltration and sabotage – or else originating in the minds of bankers and speculators whom they believed would gladly ruin a country in order to line their own pockets, the real threat would ultimately present itself in a very transparent and law-abiding fashion. Consider, by way of explanation, the way modern political campaigns tend to be conducted. Since campaigning as we know it here at the beginning of the 21^st century really came into being – roughly sometime in the middle of the 19^th century – it has tended to be a very expensive endeavor. Transportation costs money, rallies cost money, leaflets cost money, buttons cost money, and the expensive but far-reaching electronic media of the modern era – radio ads, television ads, streaming ads, and social media ads – cost even more. Fundraising is thus perhaps the most important single responsibility that any potential candidate for elected office must attend to from the moment they even begin to imagine their swearing in to the last possible second before the polls officially open. To be a political aspirant, therefore, is to pretty much always be on the lookout for new and larger sources of cash.

There are rules, of course, as to where this cash can come from. In the United States of America, campaign finance laws ensure that most political donations are recorded and readily accessible to the public, that individuals cannot donate more than a set amount, that ostensibly non-partisan organizations like labor unions and social welfare groups do not make direct donations to political candidates, and that political parties do not accept more than a given amount of money per election or per year. Because of the high stakes of national and even state elections – the prize being the power to influence and/or alter the laws and policy priorities of the jurisdiction in question – the ability to work effectively within and around these regulations has naturally become a skill of tremendous value to the public and private organizations whose material well-being or ideological objectives stand to be directly affected by the identity of the individual or the party in power. Enter the modern lobbyist. The job of a lobbyist, and the purpose of the firms that employ them, is essentially to turn private money into public influence. In its simplest form, this might entail little more than a campaign of persuasion whereby a candidate for office – many of whom, it bears noting, are already office-holders themselves – is convinced by way of personal favors – the gifting of luxury goods, the organizing of fundraisers, or the securing of individual donors, for example – to support such policies once elected as the employer of the lobbyist in question prefers. So long as such favors are reported, and do not exceed a set maximum in terms of their monetary value, no harm is reported as having been done.

Costlier forms of lobbying tend also to be less direct in consequence of the aforementioned campaign finance regulations restricting large money donations directly to individual campaigns. So-called “Political Action Committees” or “PACs” are an increasingly popular means of exerting this kind of indirect influence in American elections, owing largely to their ability to accept and spend tremendous amounts of money during the course of a political campaign almost entirely outside of the rule regime that currently governs political funding in the United States. This evident circumvention of campaign finance regulations is made possible by the existence of a particular subset of PAC, labeled as an “independent-expenditure committees,” whose operations are legally and functionally separate from those of a candidate or party-run political organization. So long as this species of PAC is operated independently of any political campaigns – and so long as its funding is disclosed in accordance with Federal Elections Commission regulations – it may accept virtually unlimited donations and spend virtually unlimited sums of money on political advertising, voter registration efforts, or any number of additional expenditures intended to aid a particular party or individual. The intention, of course, on the part of those people or organizations who donate to a PAC is that their support will both accomplish the election of their preferred candidate and ensure – pursuant to the aforementioned disclosure regulations – that the newly-minted public servant in question does not soon forget who it was that helped make their election possible.

And then there are what the United States Internal Revenue code refers to as 501(c) organizations, a category which includes (but is not limited to) labor unions, social welfare groups, and chambers of commerce. Provided that the primary stated purpose of a 501(c) is not partisan political advocacy, campaign finance regulations currently active in the United States of America allow for substantial participation, directly or indirectly, in electioneering activities without the need to publically report their donors. 501(c)(4) entities in particular – the aforementioned social welfare organizations – have in consequence become particularly active in state and federal political campaigns over the course of the decade preceding the 2020 elections, with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Planned Parenthood, and the National Rifle Association (NRA) being among the most prominent. Of these named organizations, the NRA has developed a particularly impressive and sophisticated regime of political fundraising and donations. Since shifting towards political activism starting in the mid-1970s, the NRA has combined a complex donor network with exceptionally effective lobbying tactics, not the least of which is the publication of an annual “report card” by the associated “National Victory Fund” rating office-holders and candidates from “A+” to “F” based on their public statements for or against gun control legislation and the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. According to this NVF scoring scheme, the NRA has distributed millions of dollars to any number of candidates over the course of the last forty years. In 2008 alone their donations totaled some forty millions dollars. In 2016 they pledged fully thirty millions dollars to the ultimately victorious Republican Party candidate for President.

As to where this money comes from, the answer is fairly straightforward. A little less than half of the NRA’s annual revenue – in 2010 amounting to just over two hundred and twenty-seven million dollars – comes from membership dues, near to half again – one hundred and fifteen million – is generated by fundraising, sales, and advertising, and the rest is made up of grants and/or contributions from individuals and corporate donors. Unsurprisingly, the corporations evidently most eager to fund the activities of the NRA include outdoor supply manufacturers, sporting goods retailers, and the developers of firearms. The extent to which this rough ratio of funding translates directly into the degree of influence each interest group may wield within the NRA is, and has been, a subject of debate. Without endeavoring to wade into the same wholly absent any stake in the outcome, it will here suffice to affirm that the NRA at least to some extent represents the interests of both its dues-paying members – presumably all of whom are reasonably avid customers of the world’s various firearms manufacturers – and of the developers and retailers of guns, ammunition, and weapons accessories who continue to do business in the United States of America. What this would seem to mean in the larger political sense, of course, is that one of the largest and most effective lobbying efforts undertaken from one election cycle to another across the length and breadth of the American republic is funded by – and presumably also serves the interest of – the collective gun-owning, dues-paying membership of a single organization and the manufacturers of the weapons which said members take it to be their unalienable right to own.

Where this all gets back to George Clinton, Cato V, and legislative influence – corruption being in this case perhaps too pointed a descriptor – is in the extent to which support by and funding from the NRA has become a necessary ingredient to the election of whole swaths of public officials serving at the state and federal level in various regions of the United States of America. Consider, to that end, the following construction. In certain jurisdictions of the American republic – barring an unlikely and very specific set of circumstances – it is practically impossible to secure election to either state or federal office without being a member of the Republican Party. This is far from unusual among modern democratic nations, of course. Political parties in counties across the world cultivate regional bases of power where experience has shown them that their resources will do the most good. It is also true, however, that in order to secure the Republican nomination in one of these jurisdictions – and in order to ensure that Republican voters don’t simply stay home come Election Day – the candidate in question must also secure the endorsement of the NRA. The Republican Party having established itself as the party of the Second Amendment since at least the 1994 mid-term elections which returned them to power in the House of Representatives for the first time since 1954 – a feat funded in no small part by NRA spending – the political interests of the National Rifle Association have enjoyed near-universal support among the membership and leadership of the GOP.

What this means in practice is that the supporters of the Republican Party – eager as anyone to see their interests hold sway over those of their political opponents – have to a large extent delegated the selection of candidates for public office to the NRA. By ranking nominees via the aforementioned system of report cards, said organization succeeds in communicating both whom its supporters should vote for – a group which at this stage includes most of the devotees of the Republican Party – and which of the nominees in question will have access to the funding necessary to successfully market their candidacy to the voters in the relevant constituencies. But while the membership and support bases of the NRA and the Republican Party at this point in time do substantially overlap – thus ostensibly indicating that the two organizations will tend to come to the same conclusions in terms of candidate selection – certain interests which could only ever form a minority in the latter enjoyed a much larger degree of influence over the former. Candidate selection within the Republican Party generally represents some manner of synthesis of local and national organizational priorities, with party elites offering – or perhaps attempting to enforce – their direction and the rank-and-file making their collective intentions known through the medium of primary and caucus votes. Candidate approval within the NRA, however, must respond to a certain degree of institutional pressure as well as to the interests of individuals and elites.

It is true, of course, that individual members of the Republican Party who hold, seek to hold, or seek to continue holding public office are to some extent also beholden to the interests and the entities that fund their campaigns – i.e. oil companies, insurance companies, aerospace companies, and the like. But these same institutional interests tend to exert less influence on candidate selection than might the equivalent corporate partners of the National Rifle Association. The NRA’s status as a 501(c)(4), after all, entitles its directors to absorb virtually unlimited quantities of money without the need to publically report every donor. In consequence, whereas it cannot but be quite clear where exactly a given Republican official is receiving their campaign funds – and thus, to some degree, to whom they are beholden – the anonymity that the NRA enjoys in terms of where its money comes from serves to effectively throw a curtain over the rationale underpinning its actions. It thus cannot seem to be anything but unclear from the outside precisely how the NVF determines which public officials receive what score and to whom said ratings – which carry with them the promise of financial support or financial destitution – are well and truly owed. Are the NRA’s corporate partners the principle drivers of candidate certification? The NRA directors? The rank-and-file membership? In all likelihood, only the leadership of the National Rifle Association can say for certain. What is clear, however, is that the NRA – among other social welfare organizations possessed of 501(c)(4) status – can and does directly influence the character and outcome of state and federal elections in the United States of America. As with the existence of state-controlled corporations like Brazil’s Petrobras – and the political consequences thereof – this is not a reality someone like George Clinton was at all prepared to imagine.

This isn’t to say that the way certain elements within Petrobras attempted to enrich themselves via the paid cooperation of public and party officials in Brazil is functionally or even morally the equivalent of the lobbying efforts yearly undertaken by the National Rifle Association or any of its non-profit counterparts. What the relevant officers of Petrobras, and Odebrecht, the Chamber of Deputies, the Senate, and the Worker’s Party did in Brazil was grossly improper and very much illegal. Public money – being the profits derived from the sale of Brazil’s petroleum resources by a company owned by the government thereof – was traded for favors, favors paved the way for kickbacks, and kickbacks made possible the purchasing of more favors. Wealthy individuals became wealthier while the Brazilian people were neither compensated nor consulted. What the NRA, its members, its corporate partners, and its allies in Congress and the states have done – and continue to do – is conversely both legal and entirely in compliance with campaign finance regulations. Like any 501(c)(4), the NRA can accept donations from whomever it wishes, make contributions to whomever it wishes, and establish the criteria by which its favor is measured and disbursed however it wishes. No one is forced to pay heed to the pronouncements of the NRA, no public money is made to change hands, and no one who accepts the private donations of the NRA – within certain established limits – is guilty of anything more than being a politician in the 21^st century. On this subject there would seem to be little room for argument.

What the behavior of Petrobras and organizations like the NRA have in common, however, is that they both sought – or seek – to gain influence over public officials serving within a given jurisdiction through the medium of financial incentives and for the purpose of securing a favorable environment for their non-partisan activities. The guilty officers of Petrobras – and of the relevant Brazilian construction firms – sought to purchase the cooperation of public and party officials for the purpose of further enriching themselves by way of a fraudulent bidding process for public energy infrastructure contracts. The directors and corporate partners of the NRA likewise endeavor to gain the cooperation of state and federal officials in staving off potential restrictions on the sale and ownership of firearms for the purpose of permitting manufacturers, retailers, and individual citizens the continued opportunity to make, sell, and buy the weapons and accessories that are their common interest. To be sure, one of these constitutes an illegal use of public money, the other a perfectly legal use of private money. But both inarguably entail a moneyed interest successfully buying political support for itself and for its partners. And both represent a form of financial influence which the late 18^th century American mind almost certainly could not have comprehended.

Recall, to that end, the fact that formal political parties did not exist in the United States of America at the time that George Clinton penned Cato V in November, 1788, and that campaigning for elected office was equally unheard of. Absent either of these contributing factors – both of which, in the context of the late 18^th century, were seen as distasteful – much of what Petrobras has done and the NRA continues to do would serve little to no purpose. Partisanship breeds competition, competition produces a desire for advantage, and advantage can often be bought. Competition can exist without partisanship, of course. People can compete very actively for a given elected office even if they don’t each of them belong to a party organization. But the addition of organization – i.e. the emergence of institutional parties with shared resources and common goals among their members – serves to elevate any given election from a matter of primarily local importance to one of potentially national value. Resources begin to flow in from outside the constituency in question, direction is handed down from national leaders and elites, and the outcome of the race in question becomes important, not just to the local interests involved but to the national organizations to which the competing candidates belong. Within this kind of elevated context, securing any kind of advantage becomes that much more important than in an exclusively non-partisan setting. George Clinton might have harbored some vague understanding that this was the case – the disdain his generation tended to feel towards the concept of partisanship generally centered on the notion that factionalism was inherently selfish and functioned mainly to distract public servants from actually serving the public. But it is highly doubtful that either he or his colleagues among the Founders could have imagined the degree to which party politics could – and soon enough would – facilitate the entry of collective fundraising and collective spending into the American political process.

It is the very idea of campaigning, of course, which makes the raising and disbursing of all this money necessary. And campaigning for public office was likewise something that people of George Clinton’s generation tended to think of as self-serving and uncouth. Taking their cues from what they thought of as the customs and mores of Roman antiquity – though in actual fact the ancient Romans were never as virtuous as those who have later sought to emulate them seem to believe – the Founders understood public office to be a kind of sacred trust bestowed upon those who showed the least interest in having access to power and who demonstrated the utmost sense of forbearance and personal integrity. Seeking after office was thus a natural disqualification from ever being able to hold it. Once simply lived a virtuous life without expectation of reward and were eventually – hopefully – elevated accordingly. They could not be said to gain reward for their behavior, of course, because public office wasn’t supposed to be rewarding. On the contrary, taking on a course of public service was supposed to entail sacrifice; a person was expected to come out of it poorer than when they went in, and gladly so. Within this conception of public office as a form of self-abnegation, the notion of campaigning was naturally thought of as anathema. To seek office was to seek power; to seek power was to be untrustworthy. Granting that people in any era, under any manner of social obligation, will still be people, outward adherence to this construction of public service did not mean that every man who ultimately possessed an office of public trust in the United States of American in the late 1780s never harbored personal ambitions or sought after more power than they had already. Regardless of how they actually felt about their public standing, however, or how earnestly they wished to improve it by ascending to some high office of state, men in the late-18^th century American republic still tended to adhere quite doggedly to a collectively-defined notion of gentlemanly conduct. And gentlemen, among other things, simply didn’t go around asking their neighbors to elect them to public office. To put it bluntly, it just wasn’t done.  

Contrary to this outwardly intractable sense of disdain on the part of the United States of America’s Founding Generation, however, campaigning has become one of the primary activities undertaken by any species of public servant in the present-day American republic. Forced to appeal to larger and larger constituencies as the state and federal electoral franchises slowly but surely expanded over the course of the 19^th century, aspirants to public office arguably had no choice but to broaden their appeal to the voting masses by way of aggressive self-promotion and the forging of alliances and voting blocs among otherwise disparate socio-cultural communities. In fairly short order, once this process was well and truly set in motion by ambitious political strategists like Aaron Burr (1756-1836) in the 1790s and 1800s and Martin Van Buren (1782-1862) in the 1820s and 1830s, it mattered very little whether the candidate in question found the concept of soliciting votes to be distasteful or not. Campaigning had a matter of political survival. The result, quite naturally, was a drastic increase in per capita electoral expenditures. Whereas a local notable drafted as a candidate for Congress in his home county in late 18^th century Virginia might expect to spend a little money on food and drink come election day for the purpose of showing his beneficence to – and thus validating the loyalty of – his neighbors, a candidate for the same office in the 1830s or 1840s would almost certainly be given to expend much larger sums on pamphlets, commemorative souvenirs, public speakers, rallies, and campaign song sheet music in addition to the traditional libations and vittles. Far from depending on their record of service and forbearance to open the way to political elevation, men who sought after some portion of the public trust needed to sell themselves to the voters by way of increasingly elaborate and all-encompassing forms of personalized advertising.

It is quite possible that Clinton could have brought himself to accept that this would someday be the case. He was, after all, a very canny political operative who understood the value of patronage, bloc voting, and populism better than the vast majority of his contemporaries and rivals. That being said, it would still seem doubtful that he could have easily wrapped his mind around the close relationship that presently exists in American political culture between lobbyists, corporations, tax-exempt organizations, and political campaigns. One reason for this, among others, is that none of these things existed during his lifetime. Political campaigning, as aforementioned, was seen as squalid and uncouth by men of Clinton’s class and generation. Corporations in the late 18^th century were small, limited in scope, and tended to have a distinct public purpose underpinning their existence. Lobbying hadn’t yet emerged as the invaluable right arm of corporate policy-making. And the only social welfare organizations recognized in any formal manner by state and federal governments in the 18^th century were the established houses of worship. Perhaps no single one of these entities or practices is so alien in concept that Clinton could not have been made to understand their purpose or value. He was, it bears mentioning again, a very canny fellow. But the sheer amount of money that corporations now regularly accrue, lobbyists traffic in, tax-exempt organizations donate, and political campaigns spend surely occupies a realm beyond even his wildest fantasies of what was possible given the resources available to the American people. Consider, by way of evidence, the following.

In January of 1791 – in the aftermath of the successful ratification of the proposed constitution against which George Clinton railed in print some two years earlier – the passage of legislation negotiated by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton (1757-1804), Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), and Congressman James Madison (1751-1836) made possible the assumption on the part of the newly-minted federal government of the combined debts of the various states. The resulting national debt totaled, to the cent, $75,463,476.52. About forty million dollars of this – fifty-three percent of the total – was domestic debt; about twelve million dollars – sixteen percent of the total – was foreign debt. For the era, it must be said, these were not necessarily astronomical sums. The British national debt had reached about that same size in the middle 1750s, and grew even larger – to a high of £130,000,000 in 1764 – as a result of Britain’s participation the Seven Years War (1754-1763). All the same, seventy-five million dollars was still a very large sum of money in 1791, of the sort that only national governments could conceivably generate and spend over an extended course of years. Bearing this in mind, one is naturally given to wonder how George Clinton – or indeed any of his contemporaries – would have reacted to the notion of a single organization spending the combined total of the United States domestic debt in 1791 – that is, again, forty million dollars – for the purpose of electing a single individual to public office. This is exactly what the National Rifle Association did in 2016, after all. Would they have shrugged, nodded, registered any reaction at all? Or would they have been astonished to learn that a private organization could come into possession of that much money and spend it all, legally, for the purpose of influencing the outcome of an election?

One hopes by now that the answers to these questions are patently clear, and that likewise there is no longer any mystery as to why Clinton’s cited contention in Cato V that larger legislatures are less likely to come under the influence of some exterior interest than smaller ones represents something less than a dependable political truism. Clinton, for all his insight, was writing in the midst of an era radically different from our own in a number of fundamental dimensions. There were no formal political parties in the United States of America in 1788, and no political campaigning, no lobbyists, no tax-exempt social welfare groups, and no billion-dollar corporations. And while one might fairly debate whether or not the emergence of the same has made the American republic a more hospitable climate for the democratic expression of individual and community interests, they have inarguably changed the way that Americans think about politics and political organization. Combined, these entities and practices have made it easier than ever before to raise vast sums of money on very short notice, made the spending of said money a practical necessity, and brought about the creation of a set of rules by which said spending might be regulated and regularized. In consequence, while it doubtless would have strained credulity to imagine in the late 18^th century that any single entity or individual could ever possess the resources necessary to effectively buy the ongoing cooperation of a national legislature comprised of four hundred or five hundred members, such an outcome is more or less de rigueur in the present that is 2019.

Cato V, Part VIII: Public Money and Private Interests

Without necessarily faulting George Clinton for arriving at what doubtless seemed to him to be a very reasonable conclusion as to the proper ratio of constituents to representatives based on the information to which he had access, I would nevertheless ask any reader of Cato V to consider the following examples from the present day before affirming the cited passage of that selfsame text as a timeless pearl of faultless political wisdom. Because though Clinton’s affirmation in 1788 that increasing the number of delegates serving in a given legislature will necessarily decrease the ability of that body to be actively corrupted was – and is – reasonable enough on its own as a theory, there are certain things which have occurred since that time whose effects on the practice of politics the author of Cato V likely could not have predicted.

Take the case of contemporary Brazil as an example. The Federative Republic of Brazil, as it is known officially, is structured not at all unlike the United States of America, with a directly elected executive, a bicameral legislature, and a supreme court. The executive – i.e. the President – is elected via a two-round runoff vote, members of the Senate are elected three each via a plurality vote from one of twenty-seven districts, members of the Chamber of Deputies are selected via proportional vote from among the various Federal States, and the Justices of the Supreme Court are appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. As of 2019 there are eighty-one Senators and five hundred and thirty-one deputies in the Brazilian National Congress. With Brazil’s population sitting at slightly over two hundred and ten million, that works out to about two million five hundred thousand people per Senator and four hundred thousand people per Deputy.

Now, already this ratio of constituents to representatives would seem to exceed what Clinton thought was acceptable in 1788 by a substantial margin. Considering the vehemence with which he objected to the prospect of Representatives in Congress being elected from districts sized to encompass a mere thirty-thousand people, one can imagine that his head would have fairly exploded at the thought of a legislator representing ten times that number. Indeed, one can perhaps also reasonably conclude that the author of Cato V would have struggled to conceive of any nation reaching a population of one hundred million without fragmenting into its constituent parts. Born at a time when the British colonies which would at length become the United States of America contained slightly less than one million people, and writing at a time when this selfsame territory encompassed less than four million, Clinton’s imagination would naturally have been limited by both his own lived experience of population expansion and the means by which he believed it possible to sustain a cohesive national polity across vast distances and amidst large, distinct, and semi-autonomous political entities. Easy though it is to forget, the reason that countries like Brazil can function as such is because technology exists – and has existed – that permits the inhabitants thereof to believe that they are all members of the same integral socio-political community. While in 2019 this communications infrastructure might most often be thought to include television and social media, it has in the past also encompassed print media, radio, telephones, telegraphs, trains, and even permanent roads and bridges. As most of these inventions fall well outside the experience of George Clinton’s lifetime – with the exceptions of roads and print – it would have been only natural for someone in his position to conclude that there was a definite limit on the number of people which could be included within the borders of a single nation before it effectively ceased to be a cohesive nation at all.  

On its face, then, it would be hard to imagine Clinton reacting with anything other than horror and amazement at the continued existence of a country like Brazil, let alone to the knowledge that Brazil is presently about average for its population in terms of the size and composition of its various political institutions. And yet, having confronted the numbers which a great many modern republics – or else representative democracies – are forced to contend with when attending to the task of governance, he would surely have had no choice but to agree that such measures as have regularly been taken are both necessary and proper. Consider, by way of evidence, the theoretical state of the Brazilian House of Deputies if even the ratio to which Clinton objected in 1788 were applied. If, for a population of two hundred and ten million, each Deputy represented thirty thousand people, the lower house of the National Congress would have to contain at least seven thousand Deputies. Not only would this substantially exceed anything that George Clinton or his fellow Founders could likely have imagined, it would represent the largest legislative body in human history. By way of comparison, recall some of the numbers that Clinton may well have been contemplating as of the late 1780s. The United States of America, as aforementioned, contained just slightly less than four million people at that point in time. At a ratio of no more than one Representative for every thirty thousand – as described in the text of the proposed constitution – the lower house of Congress was set to contain a maximum of one hundred and thirty-three members. While the actual number ended up being substantially lower – due to certain districts containing more than thirty thousand people – this is the base figure that Clinton had to work with and the number upon which he could – and presumably did – fix his disdain.

One hundred and thirty-three Representatives, it seemed, were by his reckoning too few to adequately reflect the diversity of interest and opinion possessed by the contemporary inhabitants of the United States of America within the context of a national legislature. What ratio would he have preferred? While it’s hard to say exactly, a reasonably educated guess might but the figure at something like ten thousand per district rather than thirty thousand. This would have yielded a House of Representatives comprised of four hundred members, a number which compares quite reasonably to the contemporary British House of Commons and its five hundred and fifty-eight MPs. Granted – and as discussed at length thus far – the House of Commons as it existed in the late 1780s hardly represented a favorable basis of comparison for a truly representative electoral regime. But at the very least it did function. Widespread corruption notwithstanding, the five hundred and fifty-eight members of the lower house of Parliament managed to form governments, formulate and approve legislation, and conduct investigations without consistently devolving into an intractable patchwork of multifarious factions. By the standards of the 18^th century, in short, it was possible for five hundred and fifty-eight people representing half as many distinct communities to go into a room somewhere and come to some kind of workable agreement on the issues of the day. Having observed this fact, it would accordingly seem reasonable enough for some like George Clinton to arrive at the conclusion that a legislature comprised of one hundred and fifty fewer members should have been able to function equally well, if not better.

 That being said, four hundred, or even five hundred and fifty-eight, is a far cry from seven thousand. And though modern communications and transportation technology has, as aforementioned, allowed magnitudes more people here at the dawn of the 21^st century to cultivate a more cohesive sense of community than was conceivable at the end of the 18^th century, the interests that govern countries like Brazil have still not attempted to push the ratio of constituents to representatives much beyond what George Clinton could have observed in contemporary Great Britain. The Brazilian Constitution could most certainly be modified so that the House of Deputies contained the aforementioned seven thousand legislators. An amendment to that effect could be proposed, and approved, and adopted in fairly short order, with the Brazilian people standing to enjoy a more granular representation in the lower house of the National Congress than they do at present. In spite of it being both possible and potentially desirable, however, such a measure has never been attempted, or seemingly even contemplated, in Brazil or in any other comparably large representative democracy. Germany, with a population of eighty-three million hasn’t tried it, or France (sixty-seven million), or Italy (sixty-million), or the United Kingdom (sixty-seven million). More than likely this is because the governing interests in all of these countries – and the electorates, presumably – have independently concluded that legislatures above a certain size, regardless of the population they are intended to represent, simply aren’t a good idea. They aren’t manageable; they’re not efficient; they don’t function, in essence. The causes behind it are doubtless varied, but the evident validity of this conclusion is spoken to by how widely it is observed. Even India, a nation of over one billion people in 2019, maintains the membership of the lower house of its national legislature at a mere five hundred and forty-five. Rest assured this was not happened upon by chance; the governing interests in India came to the same realization as did their counterparts in other representative democracies. That is to say, notwithstanding actual population figures, there is a limit beyond which the size of a legislative assembly becomes a hindrance to its ability to perform its intended role. 

Being made to realize this practical truth of modern democratic organization – along with the aforementioned ability of modern communications technology to forge relatively cohesive political communities out of vast and disparate populations – would doubtless have altered no small portion of Clinton’s thinking on the subject of legislative representation. Sincere though he may have been in his assertion in 1788 that the people of the United States stood to be dangerously underrepresented in the version of Congress described in the text of the proposed constitution, it is exceedingly difficult to imagine that his sense of conviction would have long withstood exposure to the realities of 20^th and 21^st century representative democracy. The figures which generations of statesmen and legislators have since been forced to content with far exceed anything which he was likely prepared to imagine, let alone take into consideration when crafting a stable model of democratic governance. This isn’t to say it was wrong of him to even question the scheme of representative government modeled by the Framers in the text of the proposed constitution, or to postulate the existence of a relationship between legislative composition and legislative behavior. On the contrary, Clinton should be admired for his willingness to question what so many others quite easily accepted, and for the incisive manner in which he did so. That being said – and as the preceding and proceeding discussions hopefully make clear – the subject of democratic representation was far more complex than he was either aware or willing to admit. And this is not even to mention the much thornier subject of political corruption.

Or perhaps “corruption” is the wrong word for it. What Clinton seemed to fear was that the small number of representatives chosen by the American people to speak on their behalf in the lower house of Congress would be too few to resist being influenced by some outside force whose interests were at odds with the general public will. Increase the number of representatives, he avowed, and the likelihood of such an outcome fades in proportion. If this was a valid theory, of course, the largest legislatures would necessarily be the least prone to having their collective will captured or subverted. 

In point of fact, however, this is demonstrably not the case. Consider, by way of example, the aforementioned National Congress of the Federative Republic of Brazil. As mentioned above, the upper house of the same contains eighty-one Senators, the lower house just over five hundred and thirty Delegates. Combined, this cohort of six hundred and twelve legislators represents a figure nearly six times larger than that which caused George Clinton to object so aggressively in 1788 to the paltry size of the proposed United States Congress. If one hundred and fifty-nine was too few – being the maximum number of Senators and Representatives permitted under the terms of the proposed constitution at the time that Clinton was writing – surely the author of Cato V would have agreed that six hundred and twelve was at the very least adequate. Mayhap it was conceivable at the end of the 18^th century that a single individual or organization could, with the proper resources, sway enough legislators within a group of one hundred and fifty-nine to essentially turn the legislative process to their own personal ends. But surely it was not possible for same outcome to result from among over six hundred of the same? Surely no one could muster the means to influence that many people towards a single goal?

As recent history has proven, of course, someone could indeed. Following what initially appeared to be a fairly routine investigation into money laundering by Brazilian law enforcement authorities beginning in 2008, a series plea deals, confessions, and further inquiries conducted between 2014 and 2017 went on to reveal the existence of a massive criminal conspiracy involving Petrobras – the Brazilian national petroleum corporation – as many as nine major construction firms, and dozens of politicians and party functionaries from across the political spectrum. Essentially, some portion of the executive leadership of Petrobras had, for a number of years, engaged in a deliberate campaign of overbidding on construction contracts with the various firms in question – the conglomerate Odebrecht being chief among them – in exchange for sizable kickbacks. In order to ensure that these contracts were approved – and would, in future, continue to be approved – both Petrobras and the construction companies also made large sums of money available to the members of the Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, and the ruling Worker’s Party who were each of them responsible for proposing, lobbying for, and authorizing the same. According to reports compiled after the fact at the behest of Brazilian investigators, this cohort of public servants included at least twenty-nine sitting Senators, thirty-four sitting Deputies, and twenty-three mayors, former mayors, former ministers, or former members of the National Congress. Marcelo Odebrecht, former CEO of the eponymous construction firm, affirmed following his own arrest and conviction for bribery that control over an account containing 40 million Brazilian reals was also given to the office of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in 2010 and transferred to the control of his successor Dilma Rousseff at the beginning of the following year. In total, some 6.2 billion reals (US $2.5 billion) were found to have been misappropriated, about half of which has thus far been recovered.

Now, obviously Petrobras and the aforementioned construction firms did not succeed in paying off over half of the total membership of the Brazilian National Congress. That is to say, their attempts to take hold of the institutions of Brazil’s public administration for their mutual financial benefit did not involve buying the cooperation of a controlling majority of the national legislature. Of the aforementioned six hundred and twelve members of the National Congress, only sixty-three sitting lawmakers were named in official reports as having taken money from one of the relevant organizations. Far from representing fifty-one percent of the total, this figures stands only slightly above ten percent. As it turned out, however, Petrobras and the construction firms didn’t need to buy a majority in the National Congress to get what it was they wanted. They just needed the right people in the right places to go along with their plans at the right time. It was for this reason, among other public officials, that they specifically targeted President Da Silva and President Rousseff, the treasurer of the ruling Worker’s Party, and the President of the Chamber of Deputies. Whereas the aforementioned coterie of Senators, mayors, and ministers doubtless served to guide particular construction projects through the processes necessary to secure their final approval, these key individuals between them arguably held the power to either facilitate the entire scheme or choke it off altogether. By buying their cooperation, the relevant executives at Petrobras and the construction firms thereby guaranteed that their shady dealings would enjoy a gloss of legitimacy and that potential internal investigations would be discouraged at the highest level.

That fact that Petrobras is a public company assuredly also went some distance towards narrowing the number of officials whose cooperation needed to be purchased. Because company revenues – generated by the ongoing exploitation of Brazil’s petroleum resources – are technically the property of the Brazilian government, company expenditures connected to major infrastructure projects must in turn by approved by members of the same. If Petrobras needs to build a pipeline, for instance, or a refinery, or new shipping facilities, it can do so only once the relevant construction contracts has been approved by the National Assembly and the President. Because these kinds of projects are doubtless quite common, it accordingly follows that any given contract shouldn’t raise many eyebrows when presented to the relevant authorities. Having knowledge of this state of affairs, the aforementioned conspirators could thus quite easily slip their inflated bids into the normal flow of business between Petrobras and the Brazilian government without having to secure the cooperation of more than the absolute minimum number of public officials. Beyond this relatively small group of beneficiaries – i.e. a few key Deputies and Senators, the leader of the lower house, a party treasurer, and the President – everyone else involved in the aforementioned approval process could safely be relied upon to assume, absent proof to the contrary, that nothing out of the ordinary was actively taking place. They would be made to facilitate corruption without ever knowing or benefiting, their ability to prevent the same stymied by a carefully targeted application of resources and attention. 

To be fair, Petrobras as its currently exists almost certainly represents a species of corporate organization that someone like George Clinton would have struggled to conceive of at the time he penned Cato V in the waning months of 1788. As discussed at length – my God, at length – in a previous series, what corporations did exist in the Anglo-American world at the end of the 18^th century tended to be both limited in scope and possessed of fairly narrow practical authority. Essentially, they functioned to make up for the financial or resource deficiencies which served to prevent a given state or national government from engaging in this or that project or enterprise whose end result was thought to be of substantial benefit to the general public. Rather than raise taxes and allocate personnel for the purpose of repairing a road, say, or building a bridge, a government might instead cede some portion of its authority to a private organization by way of a charter in order to see the same end accomplished at a reduced rate or according to a more efficient timetable han it could have managed itself. Petrobras, to be sure, aligns more closely with this description of a corporation than most modern multinationals, the stated purpose of which has far more to do with increasing share value than generating some manner of demonstrable public benefit. But its sheer size and behavior would still seem to place it well beyond what someone like George Clinton was likely prepared to imagine.

The aforementioned Bank of North America was perhaps the closet corporate entity in terms of scope and purpose with which he might have been familiar. Its purpose was to facilitate government spending; its share releases were authorized according to a government-defined plan. But the Banks was still, at its heart, a private institution whose operating capital came from private sources. Petrobras, by comparison, is a fundamentally public entity, its majority shareholder – to the tune of 64% – being the government of Brazil and the revenue it generates being government property. Corporations on this model, while quite common today – from Petrobras, to Mexico’s Pemex, to Norway’s Equinor, to Saudi Arabia’s Aramco – were completely unknown to the likes of George Clinton, thereby necessarily limiting his ability to conceive of the means by which corruption might be facilitated completely within the sphere of government. The danger, as recent events in Brazil have made clear, lies not just with individuals or organizations exterior to government whose resources might permit them to compromise the same. It can also originate with entities that exist – quite intentionally – somewhere between the public and private spheres. Their mentality having been molded by the need to exist in the latter, they may in turn attempt to use their connection to the former to further their pursuit of profit at the expense of the public good. 

Cato V, Part VII: Bubbles, Bubbles Everywhere, and the Chancellor in the Clink

The saga of the South Sea Company is an exceptionally complex one, especially for those of us not intimately familiar with the subtleties of debt consolidation and interest rates. Government annuities were traded for stock, the value of stock was used to buy more stock, the purchase of stock by certain individuals was used to increase the overall price of existing stock, making it more desirable, leading to more purchases, and so on, and so forth, into a vortex of defaults and pyramid schemes from which few people emerged unscathed. Leaving these finer details to the side, however, the general thrust of the thing would seem to have been relatively straightforward. In 1711 the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, a man named Robert Harley (1661-1724), determined after a detailed examination of the national debt that the best way to refinance the nine million pound sum that was owed – a task which the Whig-controlled Bank of England was disinclined to perform for the Tory government of which Harley was a member – was to set up a joint-stock venture under the guise of a trading company whose prospective share value would entice people to give up their government annuities. Because the creation of such an entity would require the approval of a charter by a majority in Parliament, promises were accordingly made to the requisite MPs as to the benefits which would accrue as a result of their acquiescence. The South Sea Company, as it would be called, would enjoy the exclusive right to trade with South America and the Caribbean, a market whose overall value was second perhaps only to the East Indies within the realm of contemporary European mercantilism. As the company made money buying and selling such lucrative commodities as slaves and sugar, shareholders would enjoy both an increase in stock price and a healthy dividend whose overall value would potentially exceed the interest they otherwise stood to collect by holding on to the aforementioned government annuities. Granted, at the time of its creation the company was prevented from engaging in such a venture by the inevitable refusal of Spanish authorities to allow the citizen-merchants of its British rival from operating within its proprietary colonial market. But in point of fact this mattered very little. Whether or not the South Sea Company ever gained access to the trade routes over which it claimed dominion, its shareholders stood to claim a tremendous return on investment.

The value of company stock, it seemed, could be made to increase by any number of means that had nothing at all to do with its stated purpose. Such was the genius of Harley and his associates in Parliament; war between Spain and Britain, news of a victory over Spain, rumors of negotiations with Spain, or even news of Spanish war fatigue would all serve to increase share value based on the promise of British conquest of all or part of Spanish colonial America. Further share price increases could be expected whenever a particularly prominent individual – say, a member of the royal family – became a subscriber, or when stock was offered as a loan against the promise of future profits. This latter arrangement – by which the price of shares was deducted from a future potential increase in their value – was particular insidious in the way that it bound new subscribers to the success of the company as a whole. And presiding over all of this were Harley and his collaborators, collectively among the largest investors in South Sea Company stock and the architects of the entire scheme. Not only did they trade the annuities that they owned themselves for shares which they expected would gain tremendously in value, but they also used their knowledge of the timing of new share issues to purchase otherwise devalued annuities just before their value was about to increase. In consequence of these kinds of tactics, investments poured in over the course of the next nine years from members of the gentry, government ministers – one of whom, Treasurer of the Navy Richard Hampden (1674-1728), used twenty-five thousand pounds of government money to purchase shares on his behalf – and even the king’s mistress and their children. And while a tremendous portion of Britain’s previously unconsolidated debt was successfully traded to the South Sea Company in exchange for shares of equal stated value – thus significantly reducing the yearly interest to be paid out of the Treasury – the consequent frenzy of speculation resulted in the emergence of an exceptionally perilous environment wherein a sudden, unexplained dearth of shareholder confidence could serve to collapse a large portion of Britain’s economy.

Unsurprisingly, this is almost exactly what happened. The outward success of the South Sea Company having inspired a host of imitators – both in style and (lack of) substance – the British economy had become fairly flooded by 1720 with shares issued under the names of companies whose stated business models were alternately novel, outlandish, nonsensical, or even illegal. Parliament accordingly opened a series of investigations into these entities, with particular attention being paid to those whose business practises were demonstrably at odds with the stated terms of their charter. One of these, the Hollow Sword Blade Company – which had been founded in 1691 for the purpose of manufacturing hollow-ground rapiers but became an unlicensed bank after it was purchased by syndicate of businessmen in 1702 – was only spared scrutiny by the fact that it had itself been instrumental in helping to form the South Sea Company back in 1711. MPs who held South Sea stock consequently voted by a significant margin to forgo a formal investigation; at least one of them later received further shares from one of the Hollow Sword’s directors. In spite of these backstage machinations, however, regulation did ultimately result. Notwithstanding a handful of previously unauthorized companies whose directors were given the chance to exchange a one-time indemnity for a royal charter – mainly those having to do with shipping insurance – the Bubble Act (1720) made it illegal for any joint-stock company to operate under British jurisdiction without first being granted the sanction of Parliament. The subsequent nullification of reams of circulating stock ultimately proved to be something of a mixed blessing for the South Sea Company. In the short time, refocusing the attention of the public – still in something of speculating lather – on the originator of the frenzy helped propel its share price to a new peak of over eight hundred pounds as of June, 1720. In the long term, however, having their shares trade at such a high value even briefly proved to be fundamentally unsustainable.

The year 1720 was a very memorable one for both the South Sea Company and for Great Britain as a whole. In January, South Sea stock traded at one hundred and twenty-eight pounds; by May it had increased to five hundred; following the passage of the Bubble Act and a bit of damage control on the part of company agents this grew to seven hundred; by midsummer it rose to an astonishing one thousand and fifty. Such a meteoric rise in value was most assuredly a source of jubilation for shareholders, but it was also arguably a signal of market volatility. The share price having increased tenfold in only six months, it was doubtless becoming increasingly clear to a least some portion of the South Sea investors that their as-yet unredeemed personal wealth possessed little in the way of a solid foundation. Seeking to get out “while the getting was good,” as it were, some people began to sell. This resulted in a series of increasingly disastrous knock-on effects. As the share price began to dip, more people started to sell while the price was still relatively inflated. Those who had purchased on credit saw their ability to repay what they owed essentially evaporate, declared bankruptcy, and liquidated more stock to cover their debts. And as the falling value of South Sea stock produced shareholder anxiety in markets in Amsterdam and Paris, the resulting scramble for liquidity on the Continent further depressed share value in Britain and produced a full-fledged rout. By September, 1720 South Sea Company stock was trading at one hundred and fifty pounds, having lost almost ninety percent of its value in two months. Banks failed, goldsmiths failed, thousands of people – including many members of the landed gentry – were reduced to financial ruin, Parliament conducted a series of fraud investigations, and the raft of ministers responsible for creating the South Seas Company to begin with – including the sitting Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Postmaster General, and the Southern Secretary – were impeached, removed from office, and, in at least one case, imprisoned. 

Returning to the subject at hand, one may now be given to wonder how it was that George Clinton could possibly have perceived the contemporary British House of Commons as evidence in itself of the positive effect of the size of a legislature on the frequency of political corruption therein when, in living memory, it had shown itself to be any but. To be sure, on the level of delegates per person, the lower house of Parliament was theoretically more representative of the population of Great Britain than the proposed Congress would have been of the population of the United States. And it could not be denied that this same legislature, in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution (1688), had seen its way clear to proposing and adopting the Bill of Rights (1689), a bold declaration of individual civil liberties and one of the most significant documents in the entire Anglo-American legal tradition. In point of fact, however, this was about all a person could honestly say in favor of the contemporary House of Commons. Many of its constituencies were exceptionally undemocratic – too small, too large, or entirely devoid of human life – especially vulnerable to corruption, freely available for purchase, or bought and paid for by a particular interest or family. And while it was certainly possible for the haphazard patchwork of electoral regulations that reigned in the counties and boroughs represented in the lower house of Parliament to produce a body of legislatures whose collective integrity belied the often dubious means by which they obtained their seats, actual events demonstrated otherwise. Notwithstanding the fact that, as Clinton conceived it, it should have been prohibitively difficult for any exterior interest to secure the cooperation of a majority of five hundred and fifty Members of Parliament for the purpose of setting in motion some manner of corrupt scheme demonstrably at odds with the public welfare, the founders of the South Sea Company did exactly that.

True, Harley and many of his collaborators were themselves MPs and government ministers and could thus only partially be classified as an outside interest. But John Blunt (1665-1733), the director of the Hollow Sword Blade Company, was not, and it was Blunt whose earlier financial machinations with devalued army pensions and forfeited Irish land formed the nucleus of what would become the South Sea Company concept. Blunt helped draw up the plans, became one of the Company’s directors, worked to drive up the share price, and helped to foil the aforementioned Parliamentary investigation by authorizing a judicious transfer of stock. Certainly he enjoyed a great deal of cooperation from within Parliament itself, to the extent that Harley should rightfully be thought of as the co-originator of the scheme. But this admission does nothing to alter the fact that Blunt, the representative of a private business interest, did a great deal to sell the idea of the South Sea Company to the critical mass of MPs necessary to secure the requisite government approvals. Regardless of how many of them there were, he and Harley seemed only to require the promise of profit to purchase their cooperation at the expense of their constituents. Indeed, based on the success they enjoyed in the immediate, the South Sea Company directors would likely not have been dismayed by the prospect of having to gain the cooperation of yet more MPs. Having purchased the support of a majority of five hundred and fifty representatives with relative ease as it was, they would surely have seized upon the prospect of six hundred, or seven hundred, or even one thousand MPs with similar alacrity. Far from being daunted or even dissuaded by such numbers, they likely would have seen every extra vote in need of purchase as another opportunity to cement the approval of their scheme, align the interests of Parliament with their own, and further drive up the South Sea Company share price.

As aforementioned, George Clinton’s use of the pseudonym Cato for his anti-constitutional missives would seem a strong indication that, despite all of the events described above having taken place years before he was born and an ocean away, he was very much aware of the circumstances and implications thereof. Cato’s Letters, one of the most influential publications within the British Whig tradition – of which the Commonwealth party formed a radical subset – had its origins in the need felt by a pair of polemicists to respond to the depth and breadth of corruption which they believed the rise and fall of the South Sea Company represented. George Clinton could have adopted any number of names to append to the bottom of his various essays in critique of the proposed constitution – the variety of monikers utilized by his fellow Anti-Federalists attesting to the same – but it was the penname selected by these aforementioned Whig polemicists on which he ultimately settled. Choosing to eschew the notion that Clinton chose to sign the name Cato either carelessly or at random – that is to say, giving Clinton some amount of credit for acting with intention – the principle question behind the inquiry at hand would seem to remain. If there was little if any evidence to be found in either contemporary American legislative circles or in the recent history and composition of the British House of Commons to support Clinton’s claim that larger legislatures were less vulnerable to corruption than smaller ones then what exactly was he driving at in the cited text of Cato V?

Of course it was possible that Clinton was speaking purely in theory, or that there was more to his understanding of the relationship between representation and corruption than his mention of the same in Cato V would have indicated. Perhaps he took it as a given, and believed his readers would do the same, that for any legislature to benefit from the phenomenon he described it would first have to establish itself on a sound, transparent, and consistent foundation. That is to say, it would have to be more like the Congress described by the proposed constitution – whose seat allocations and electoral regulations remained essentially the same across every legislative district in the country – and less like the contemporary British House of Commons – whose constituencies represented a haphazard patchwork of medieval-era traditions and practises that had gone almost entirely unreformed since their inception. Based on this assumption – which seems, on balance, a fairly safe one – it was more likely the principle represented by the House of Commons that Clinton was pointing to in Cato V than the practice thereof. Naturally there was bound to be corruption afoot when so many of the legislators in question were chosen by such manifestly corrupt and self-interested means. Eliminate opportunities for corruption in the selection process, however, and the validity of the principle in question will naturally make itself evident. Because of course men who are elected by self-interested means will act in a self-interested manner. And just so, men who are elected in such a way as to accurately represent the interests and desires of their constituents will naturally be harder to bribe. Certainly they will not be immune to a man from the temptation of personal enrichment or the coercive power of fear. But at least their collective baseline resistance to corruption will be higher.

Based on this manner of reasoning, Clinton’s belief in the ability of larger groups of legislators to better resist corruption than smaller groups would appear to be little more than a straightforward numbers game. If the means by which lawmakers are elected can be established on a basis of consistency and transparency, to the point that every member of the relevant legislature can be said to accurately represent the interests and the will of a majority of their constituents, then the only factor which would seem likely to increase the ongoing level of political corruption therein would be the moral quality of the average legislator. This is, of course, a very difficult trait to measure. Some people, for whatever reason, will reliably give way to temptation given the right set of circumstances. And other people, for equally unknowable reasons, will not. If the frequency of individuals susceptible to temptation is higher on average across the human race than is the frequency of individuals immune to the same, then the idea that larger legislatures are safer from corruption than smaller ones would seem to be essentially baseless. However many legislators are allocated per person, and on however transparent a basis, more of them will be more likely to give way to self-interest should the opportunity arise. If, on the other hand, the reverse is true, and the frequency of individuals immune to temptation is higher on average than the frequency of individuals vulnerable to temptation, then Clinton’s principle would seem to be quite sound. In a reality in which more constitutionally honest people exist than not, increasing the number of representatives per person in any given legislature will inevitably bring more of them into government.

Granted, this all represents a fairly metaphysical approach to constitutionalism, and one whose validity can’t ever really be proven or refuted. That isn’t to say it’s a wholly meritless approach, of course. An essential part of any process which results in the creation or modification of the structures of government is an ongoing consideration of how and why humans act the way that they do. Political institutions, in this sense, are a species of machine which transform the actions, ambitions, and weaknesses of individuals into actionable public policy. Knowledge of human nature provides insight into how and by whom the machine is going to be used, ways in which it might become victim to sabotage, and the best means of keeping it running smoothly and in accordance with its design. Clinton’s evident conviction, therefore, that human beings are more honest as a species than they are not is both entirely relevant to the question of legislative composition and entirely valid as an answer in itself.

Or at the very least it is valid in theory. That the whole structure of Clinton’s argument takes place almost entirely in principle arguably points to both the essential strength and the primary weakness of the concept which he seemed so keen to put forward. Maybe human beings really are more honest and forthright than they are deceitful and duplicitous and the propensity of the latter traits to make themselves known in public office is merely a consequence of an imperfect representation of the general will. As strides continue to be made towards translating the actual interests of a given community into political representation and public policy, this may yet be conclusively proven as a verifiable truth. In this sense, Clinton may have at least been hinting at something of essential significance to the science and practice of government. But then again he may have been wrong, and not just because people tend to favor self-interest more than he believed was the case. As machines, political institutions are more than just the sum of the people that operate inside them. Their ability to function as their designers intended is also continuously shaped by the conditions in which they operate and the rules by which different components are replaced. Properly maintained, a political institution may theoretically function at an optimum level of effectiveness for an indefinite interval without the need for significant overhaul or repair. But condition in fact can rarely be accounted for in theory by even the most thoughtful and far-sighted designers. The machine, in consequence, may be used for too long without inspection, develop flaws, or be overtaken by changing conditions. It accordingly begins to malfunction, its malfunctions are ignored, and in time enough it starts to operate at a fraction of its intended output.

To a large extent, this is exactly what happened to the British House of Commons. Though on its face – and certainly by contemporary European standards – it was a remarkably representative body whose ability to hold the powers of the monarchy in check was entirely without peer, its ability to provide an accurate representation of the British people diminished in approximate proportion to the time that passed following the establishment of this or that procedure. County seats and borough seats – of whatever subtype – were doubtless founded with the intention of ensuring that the distinct communities of which Britain was comprised enjoyed the degree of influence warranted by their size and location. But time and inattention wreaked havoc with the whole scheme. Formerly prosperous market towns were displaced by new constructions, blighted by economic downturns, or fell prey to natural disasters while elsewhere small electorates grew to understand that their votes come election time were worth far more in trade than in practice. The quality of the people’s representation did not outwardly appear to suffer; the number of MPs per person remained relatively high. But the integrity of the machine began to suffer, from use and misuse in arguably equal measure. In this sense, Clinton seemed to be speaking reasonably rather than empirically in the cited passage of Cato V. That is to say, rather than speak based on what the evidence of his senses told him, he attempted to draw conclusions from what he believed to be logical. Yes, he would doubtless have admitted, the contemporary House of Commons was notoriously corrupt. And in that sense it was hardly a fit model for emulation in the United States of America. But at least it allocated seats in reasonable proportion to the population for which it claimed to speak. Purge it of its various electoral eccentricities and it will function in such a manner as the American people would do well to pay heed.

But therein, as ever, lays the rub. It is very easy to say that protecting a legislature from falling prey to corruption is simply a matter of getting more people into government – believing, of course, that people are generally honest. But it is quite another to put in place such measures as would achieve this outcome while avoiding any number of unintended complications. The version of Congress described in the text of the proposed constitution arguably represented exactly the kind of rational and transparent model of legislative assembly that a critic of the contemporary British House of Commons would doubtless have held up as an ideal alternative. And though Clinton as Cato registered a number of complaints against the same over the course of his various anti-constitutional missives, the fact that he urged the expansion of the number of Representatives therein would seem to indicate that he did not entirely disagree. Had he believed that the whole conception of Congress embedded in the text of the proposed constitution was invalid he could just as well have said so. That he did not, and instead offered a detailed list of what he believed to be its faults and failures, would seem to indicate that he was at least open to the idea of Congress as constructed by the Framers. Presumably, if the issues to which he attempted to draw attention were addressed to his satisfaction he would have shifted from opposing ratification to supporting it. That is to say, if Representatives in Congress were chosen on an annual rather than biennial basis, and if each of them was allocated to a district containing fifteen thousand or twenty thousand rather than thirty thousand people, Clinton might well have seen his way clear to deeming the project as a whole to be broadly acceptable.

Contrasting directly the respective electoral frameworks of the proposed Congress and the contemporary House of Common would seem to reveal quite clearly why someone like George Clinton might have favored the former at least in part, provided that its architects adopted a number of key modifications. As aforementioned, the House of Commons (circa 1790) contained some five hundred and fifty-eight MPs elected every five to seven years – there being no fixed term of office – to represent a population of about ten million. While this averaged out to one MP for every eighteen thousand people, the different electoral regulations in place in different parts of the country ensured that many communities were either grossly overrepresented or alarmingly underrepresented. As aforementioned, there were county constituencies containing several thousand people, freeholder boroughs containing several hundred, scot and lot boroughs containing fewer than ten, and burgage boroughs containing none at all. Regardless of these irregularities, however – and which included county seats containing several hundred thousand people – most constituencies sent at least two MPs to Westminster. By comparison, the version of Congress described by the Framers in the text of the proposed constitution was exceptionally consistent in terms of structure and operation. Each Representative would stand for election every two years within a district containing no less than thirty-thousand people. A census was to be held every ten years to aid in maintaining this ratio of legislators to constituents and seats would be reapportioned as needed on a broad basis of equality. These rules would apply with equal force in New York or Georgia, Pennsylvania or South Carolina, as well as consistently within the boundaries of each of the states themselves.

Again, though Clinton most definitely took issue with certain specific aspects of this plan, he could not but have held it as a far better basis upon which to establish a national legislative regime than that which underpinned the contemporary British House of Commons. It was only the ratio of legislators to constituents exhibited by the latter which he seemed to believe should have been replicated in the former. As mentioned above, every MP seated in Westminster as of the late 1780s and early 1790s represented about eighteen thousand people on average. But by the terms of Article I, Section 2 of the proposed constitution, “The Number of Representatives [in Congress] shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand [.]” Granting that the consistency embodied by this selfsame text almost certainly guaranteed that more Americans would enjoy a fairly accurate representation in Congress than would most British people in the House of Commons, the figure of thirty thousand people (or greater) for every district represented in the lower house of Congress still appeared to be too broad for George Clinton. To his thinking, it seemed, that base number needed to be lower: twenty thousand, perhaps, or fifteen thousand, or ten thousand, or even five thousand. Only once they could claim to enjoy such a fine-grained representation in their national legislature could the American people rest easy in the knowledge that their interests were not being unnecessarily elided or abstracted by the national government that they had consented to erect. And only in the event that as many people were sent to the proposed House of Representatives as was reasonably possible could that body truly claim to be anywhere near to being safe from “the influence of corruption, and the temptation of treachery.”

Cato V, Part VI: Freeman, Pot Wallopers, and the Unreformed House of Commons

Having thus far explored the nature of political corruption as George Clinton would have known it in late 18^th century America and found little to suggest that anything he experienced directly would have led him to believe – as he seemed to state in the text of Cato V – that larger legislatures were more secure from corruption than small ones, it would accordingly appear necessary to turn elsewhere in search of potential explanations. Specifically, recalling Clinton’s citation of “the history of representation in England” in the seventh and last paragraph of the aforementioned essay, it would seem at least possible that the Parliament of Great Britain served as a source of inspiration for this provocative claim. Its numbers, after all, far exceeded those of the proposed House of Representatives, and indeed of any of the legislatures of the various American states. Perhaps Clinton saw in this a viable model to be emulated.

As has been already been demonstrated, however, the House of Commons was not less corrupt for its size than either Congress or the New York State Legislature. On the contrary, it was substantially more corrupt than either of these bodies. The primary reason for this should be fairly obvious. Though the House of Commons contained a substantially greater number of representatives per constituent than any comparable body in the United States – thereby presumably creating significant barriers against a theoretical campaign of coordinated influence – said individuals were generally selected on something less than a rigorously democratic basis. Based on the electoral qualifications in place in a given constituency – county or borough, freeman or scot and lot, corporation or householder – the actual number of electors could vary considerably, the effects of which ranging from mild to quite severe. In a county constituency, for example, the franchise belonged to all adult males who could claim ownership of property valued at a minimum of two pounds per year according to the land tax rolls. As the value of the pound decreased over time, this basic qualification – established in 1430 and left unchanged for some four hundred years – allowed more and more people in county ridings to claim the right to vote. By the time of the Great Reform Act (1832), the total number of county electors in England accordingly stood at about one hundred and ninety thousand. Granting that, in spite of this relatively robust electorate, elections in county seats often went uncontested – and indeed often resulted in the same handful of landed families possessing seats in Parliament for generations – this was as much a matter of culture as it was a question of design. County elections in otherwise sleepy districts could often be fiercely fought during moments of particularly intense partisan strife, and certain ridings in particular – Middlesex being the most obvious, containing as it did a large portion of suburban London – were more often than not the sites of rigorous contests involving a large and exceptionally engaged electorate.

Borough seats, on the other hand, were among some of the most corrupt in the entire unreformed House of Commons owning to a combination of their static boundaries and narrow qualifications. Freeman boroughs were theoretically the most democratic, the requirements of freeman status being determined on a district-by-district basis. The City of London, for example, averaged about seven thousand freemen over the course of the 18^th century, and about a quarter of the nearly one hundred that remained identified at least one thousand electors each. Elections in these constituencies were almost always contested, with campaigns that pivoted on relevant political issues rather than the local popularity of the candidates in question or the ability of a given patron to purchase the loyalty of the voters. Many more freeman boroughs, however, counted less than two hundred electors in total and were almost entirely under the influence of a single wealthy beneficiary or local landed family. Scot and lot boroughs – so named for the local tax one paid in order to qualify to vote – were similar to freeman boroughs in the wide range of democratic quality that they respectively occupied. On one end of the spectrum was the London riding of Westminster whose electors ranged from eight thousand to twelve thousand over the course of the 18^th century. Westminster had one of the largest voting populations in all of contemporary Britain, almost always witnessed contested elections, and became a hotbed of radical politics in the 1770s and 1780s. And then there was Gatton, in Surrey, whose total voting population at one point fell as low as two. Since the constituency continued to elect two MPs until its abolition in 1832, this meant that for a time during its almost four hundred year history each Member of Parliament for Gatton represented exactly one person.

  Corporation boroughs – of which, in the unreformed House of Commons, there were twenty-seven in total – removed even the illusion of popular participation in the democratic process (such as it was) by restricting the franchise solely to members of the local governing authority. None of the relevant borough councils contained more than sixty members, many contained far fewer, and the majority eventually found themselves in the pocket of some wealthy patron or other whose political aspirations could very easily be served by putting a little money in the pockets of a few dozen local officials. Susceptible as these kinds of constituencies might have been to corruption, however, the burgage boroughs were arguably worse. In districts such as these, the electorate was comprised of the owners of specifically designated properties – a house, a farm, or even an empty field where something of value used to be – whether they actually resided in area or not. Certain burgage boroughs accordingly became notorious for sending MPs to Westminster whose formal constituencies contained no living human beings. In addition, because the franchise in such constituencies was tied very directly to property ownership – in a one-to-one fashion, in fact – a single, non-resident individual could conceivably purchase all of the relevant properties and cast every vote themselves. The burgage borough of Old Sarum very much typified this kind of arrangement. Though once the site of a cathedral, a supporting town, and even a royal palace, the prominence of Old Saurm was eventually displaced by the emergence of the town of Salisbury and its buildings were eventually pillaged for much-needed materials. By 1322 it had already fallen into severe neglect; by the 18^th century it was an uninhabited hillside essentially owned by the Pitt family.

Perhaps the most problematic borough subtype represented in the 18^th century House of Commons was known alternately by the names “householder” and “pot-walloper.” So called because the franchise was open to every resident male householder who was not actively receiving either alms or poor relief – and could thus be said to at least have access to a hearth and pot – householder boroughs were paradoxically among the most democratic in all of Britain and counted among their number some of the most nakedly corrupt. The problem, by and large, was that householder boroughs tended to be quite small and their electorate quite poor. The borough of Northampton, it was true, counted over one thousand electors as early as the 17^th century, and many others were centered on fairly substantial towns which included among their inhabitants several hundred qualified voters. But more often the pot-wallopers contained less than one hundred total electors whose partisan support tended to be open to negotiation. In some cases this was a matter of individual initiative. At Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire in 1761, for example, one of the victorious candidates opted simply to pay the voters the sum of five pounds each for their backing. In other cases the residents actually banded together to bargain for a higher overall rate, essentially turning the vote into a kind of impromptu auction. While these kinds of practises were perhaps not the norm – the dispensing of large quantities of alcohol was easily the most common means by which electoral loyalty was secured – they nevertheless speak very effectively to the overall character of the householder subtype of borough constituency. They tended to be small, their electors perfectly willing to trade their vote – which would hardly keep them fed if they sought to use it “responsibly,” or else provide them with a night’s supply of beer or cider – and their representatives accordingly both wealthy and unscrupulous.

In light of the fact that the various types of constituencies described above accounted – along with the Welsh county seats, the Scottish county and burgh seats, and the university seats – for the entirety of the composition of the late 18^th century House of Commons, it would seem exceptionally difficult to imagine how it was that someone like George Clinton could possibly have concluded by way of observation that the extensive representation therein served as a practical bulwark against legislative corruption. Clearly, though there were almost six hundred constituencies represented in the contemporary House of Commons, a great many of them were subject to alarming levels of corruption simply on the basis of how their respective elections were held. Some, it bears recalling, were possessed of quite large and robust electorates whose attention tended to be focused on issues rather than personalities, and who consequently showed by their habit of producing very close results that their representation would in the end actually be the product of their evolving interests as a community. Many more, however, contained very small numbers of voters, or voters who were easily purchased, or no voters at all. From these constituencies, one would have been hard pressed to expect the election of anything close to an accurate representation of the needs and desires of the relevant populations. Rather, by way of custom, influence, the dispensing of bribes, and the purchasing of property rights, these seats – absent some kind of wide-ranging reform – would inevitably fall into the hands of the wealthy, the ambitious, and those least concerned with fulfilling the promise embodied specifically by the Bill of Rights (1689) and fundamentally by the concept of representative government. 

Potential for malfeasance is not the same as proof of malfeasance, of course. The fact that a sizable percentage of the five hundred and fifty-eight seats of which the House of Commons was comprised in the late 18^th century were elected as a result of bribery, coercion, or the otherwise unrepresentative nature of certain borough constituencies did not necessarily guarantee that the assembled MPs would proceed to conduct themselves in a similarly corrupt manner. Verification of the unsuitability of the contemporary House of Commons as an example of the positive relationship between the size of a given legislature and its relative resistance to corruption requires some manner of practical evidence. That is to say, notwithstanding the manner by which many of them were chosen, did the MPs who sat in the House of Commons over the course of the 18^th century ever act in a manner that could be said to have betrayed the vulnerability of said body to widespread political corruption? By way of an answer, one instance in particular comes to mind of which an Anglo-American individual adopting the nom de plume Cato in the latter half of the 18^th century was almost certain to have been aware. Cato, as it happened, was the same pseudonym adopted by a pair of British writers active between the 1680s and 1740s named John Trenchard (1662-1723) and Thomas Gordon (1691-1750) for a series of polemic essays published in the London Journal between the years 1720 and 1723. Cato’s Letters, as they have since become known, formed an essential part of the British “Commonwealth party” tradition whose members, though exiled to the fringes of contemporary political discourse, nonetheless loudly decried the influence of corruption in British politics and advocated civic virtue and republicanism as potential cures for what they believed was then ailing British society. Published over the course of three years, the one hundred and forty-four Letters sought to respond to a great many things, and in the process laid the ideological groundwork for continued radical political agitation both in Britain proper and its colonial periphery. The issue which set Trenchard and Gordon writing in the first place, however, was the collapse of the so-called “South Sea Company” in the autumn of 1720.