What is interesting about studying political parties is that there are no founding documents that set rules for how they behave or what their function should be.For most political issues, I like to start with the U.S. Constitution. While there are disagreements over interpretation, there is at least something written that we can try to understand. Yet interesting enough there is nothing about parties in the Constitution; America’s founding document is completely silent on the subject.The best example of the founders lack of forethought in the creation of parties is how the president was chosen. According to the Constitution, “The Electors shall meet in their respective States, and vote by Ballot for two Persons… The President of the Senate shall, in the Presence of the Senate and House of Representatives, open all the Certificates, and the Votes shall then be counted. The Person having the greatest Number of Votes shall be the President… In every Case, after the Choice of the President, the Person having the greatest Number of Votes of the Electors shall be the Vice President.”In other words, whoever wins the Electoral College is president and second place is vice president. If we still operated under this system, our current president would be Joe Biden and our vice president would be Donald Trump. Can you imagine how this would work today? Well, it did not work back then either. While there were no parties in the very beginning, by the third election in 1796 the Federalist candidate won the presidency, and the Democratic Republican candidate became vice president. It worked about as well as a Biden/Trump presidency would work today. And so, in 1804, the 12th Amendment changed voting procedures to the current system. It’s not that the founders could not envision political parties when they wrote the Constitution -- they did. It’s that they hoped the new nation could rise above them and overcome their differences.Many of the founders were fans of the political philosopher Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke. Lord Bolingbroke, writing in England, pushed the idea of a “Patriot King,” a man who could stand above the political factions in Britain at the time and consider the people’s needs first. The founders hoped to model the American president along this line -- a man not swayed by factions (an early word for parties) but someone who was above and represented the people. They wanted ...
