The Founders Didn’t Want Bipartisanship. They Wanted Liberty.

Every election cycle, the same wearying chorus rises from the commentariat, the pollsters, and the politicians who croon for the middle: We need more bipartisanship. The plea is that Republicans and Democrats should put aside their differences, come together, and get things done. It sounds so reasonable you could almost hum it. But that entire idea is built on a profound misunderstanding of what our government was designed to do. It mistakes a constitutional republic for a parliamentary popularity contest, and the price of that mistake is your liberty.

The real, rarely examined angle on bipartisanship is not whether it works in practice, but that the Founders never wanted it in the first place. They did not sit in Philadelphia to design a system that would pass laws quickly and comfortably. They built a machine deliberately geared to slow passion into deliberation so that only those measures with broad, durable consent, and which stayed strictly within the Constitution's enumerated powers, would ever reach a president's desk. In that fundamental sense, gridlock is not a bug. It is the whole point. Today's worship of across-the-aisle cooperation is, at its core, anti-constitutional.

A Machine Built to Say No

James Madison in Federalist No. 51 lays out the architecture with cold clarity: "Ambition must be made to counteract ambition." The separate branches, the checks and balances, the bicameral legislature, the presidential veto, all of it was not meant to help government act. It was meant to stop it from acting rashly and to safeguard individual rights from what the Founders feared most, the tyranny of the majority. We live in a republic, not a pure democracy, precisely because the Framers understood that a majority drunk on its own passions could vote away the rights of the minority with dispatch if the process were too easy. The Constitution is a chain on the leviathan, not an accelerator.

In Federalist No. 10, Madison gets even more specific about the danger of "faction," which he defines as any group, whether a majority or a minority, "united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community." His solution was not a grand coalition where everyone joins hands and sings Kumbaya. It was to extend the sphere, multiply the number of interests, and make it ferociously difficult for any single faction to impose its will on the whole country. The system uses conflict, the grinding friction between competing ambitions, to protect liberty. The harder it is to pass a law, the less likely that law will be an act of raw factional power that tramples the rights of the people who lost the vote.

When you view modern bipartisanship through that originalist lens, it starts to look less like statesmanship and more like an end-run around the Constitution's safeguards. Bipartisanship, in practice, is often a temporary alliance of factions that have agreed to collectively expand government power, spend money we do not have, or regulate what you may do with your property, your children, or your body. It means Democrats and Republicans joining together to ignore the Tenth Amendment, trample federalism, and centralize authority in Washington. It means passing a two-thousand-page omnibus spending bill that no one has actually read, because the deal required everyone to look the other way. That is not responsible governance. That is a momentary truce in the raid on the public treasury.

The Seen and the Unseen of Getting Things Done

Henry Hazlitt's great lesson applies here beautifully. In his timeless book Economics in One Lesson, he taught us to look beyond the immediate, visible effects of a policy to the unseen consequences that ripple through the whole society over the long run. When we see a bipartisan bill signed into law with fanfare, the new program, the new subsidy, the new entitlement, we see the ribbon-cutting and the grateful recipients. What we do not see are the thousands of private decisions that will never be made because of the new uncertainty, the businesses that will never be started, the jobs that will never be created, the freedom that evaporates silently. Every dollar that Congress spends together is a dollar first taken from someone who earned it, and every new regulation is a small piece of liberty surrendered.

The deeper problem is what Friedrich Hayek called the knowledge problem. No collection of legislators in a room, no matter how well-intentioned or how bipartisan, can ever possess the dispersed, local, practical knowledge that millions of free individuals use every day to make their own decisions. When two parties agree on a grand scheme to manage the economy, reform healthcare, or reshape education, they are not pooling wisdom. They are pooling ignorance and calling it consensus. The central planner's fatal conceit does not become less fatal just because both sides of the aisle endorse it. Hayek's road to serfdom is paved with those very handshakes.

Look at the historical record. The New Deal's bipartisan patina was built on Republicans abandoning the party's limited-government roots to make peace with an administrative state that now swallows whole sectors of the economy. The war on terror gave us the Patriot Act with overwhelming votes from both sides, and we are still living under the surveillance state it built. The No Child Left Behind Act was the most sweeping federal intrusion into local education in a generation, and it sailed through with Ted Kennedy and George W. Bush arm in arm. More recently, the infrastructure bills, the CHIPS Act, the so-called bipartisan gun control framework, even the Respect for Marriage Act, all were hailed as proof that Washington can still work. But notice what working meant in those cases. It meant a federal government doing things the Constitution never authorized, cheered on by both teams.

From Milton Friedman's perspective, every one of those bipartisan deals further entangles government and the economy, undermining the economic freedom that is the foundation of political freedom. From Thomas Sowell's lens, the intentions were noble, they always are, but the results will be the usual: a trail of unintended consequences visited upon the very people the legislation was supposed to help. The seen is the photo op. The unseen is the slow, steady erosion of self-government.

The Uniparty and the Danger of Majoritarian Thinking

Critics of the "uniparty," that permanent Washington class that benefits from ever-expanding government no matter which letter sits in the Oval Office, are often dismissed as cynical or divisive. But they are observing the logical outcome of valuing bipartisanship over constitutional restraint. When "working together" becomes the highest political virtue, the bright line between liberty and coercion blurs. The real divide is not left versus right. It is concentrated power versus the individual citizen.

The Founders understood this. They gave us a government of strictly enumerated powers precisely because they feared the sort of concert that bipartisanship celebrates. John Adams famously insisted that we have "a government of laws, and not of men." But when too many men and women of both parties join hands to enlarge the law beyond the Constitution's original meaning, we cease to have a republic of laws and drift toward a system of men. Well-meaning men, perhaps, but men nonetheless. And as Justice Antonin Scalia tirelessly reminded us, the Constitution is not a living document to be reinterpreted by the whims of the age. Its text has a fixed, knowable meaning. A bipartisan majority voting to ignore that meaning does not make the act constitutional. It makes it a bipartisan violation of the supreme law of the land.

This is not merely a procedural complaint. It is a matter of retaining our identity as a free people. The Constitution sets boundaries on what the federal government may do, period. If both parties agree to bulldoze those boundaries, we do not get a shining example of cooperation. We get tyranny with a smile. Ludwig von Mises showed that without market prices, socialist planning fails by economic calculation. The same logic applies to the sprawling regulatory state. When Congress, in a bipartisan spirit, hands vast discretionary power to unelected agencies, those agencies are attempting to plan the economy without the information only free markets provide. The result is waste, cronyism, and the slow strangulation of private initiative, all blessed by both parties.

Let the Tension Do Its Work

So what is the alternative to the cult of bipartisanship? Not reflexive obstructionism for its own sake, but a principled insistence that Congress stick to its constitutional lane, no matter how many legislators agree to ignore it. The proper question is not "Did both sides support this?" but "Is this authorized by the Constitution, and does it respect the rights of the individual?"

We should demand a return to Madisonian conflict, the healthy, designed tension between branches that keeps any single faction from dominating. We should expect our representatives to argue fiercely over first principles, because those arguments are the sound of a free republic working as intended. The Framers did not give us a system for efficient government. They gave us a system for limited government, because they knew that efficiency in the hands of the state is a threat to liberty.

The next time a politician crows about a "bipartisan breakthrough," ask not what they are doing, but what they are doing outside the bounds of the Constitution. If they are truly acting within those bounds, they do not need bipartisan glory. They just need to do their job and respect the limits on their power. The great American tension between ambition and ambition is not a flaw to be overcome in the name of getting along. It is the bulwark that has kept us free for over two centuries. Stop smothering it with the soft tyranny of false harmony. Disagreement, slow and frustrating as it might be, is the price of liberty. And it is a price well worth paying.