In response to Sec'y Pete's tweet, some rando busted out a hilarious appeal to authority, basically saying, "oh yeah, well, James Madison vetoed an internal improvements bill because this isn't an enumerated power, so suck it, libs!" He got mad and told me to take my meds when I challenged him to cite which of Jemmy's seven vetoes he meant, and I dared to note that other things happened over the intervening 207 years. But hey, it gives me a fun deep dive for a rainy Saturday!
First, here's what Madison said when rejecting, via pocket veto on his last day in office, the so-called Bonus Bill of 1817 ("To set apart and pledge certain funds for internal improvements"):
I am not unaware of the great importance of roads and canals and the improved navigation of water courses, and that a power in the National Legislature to provide for them might be exercised with signal advantage to the general prosperity. But seeing that such a power is not expressly given by the Constitution, and believing that it can not be deduced from any part of it without an inadmissible latitude of construction and a reliance on insufficient precedents; believing also that the permanent success of the Constitution depends on a definite partition of powers between the General and the State Governments, and that no adequate landmarks would be left by the constructive extension of the powers of Congress as proposed in the bill, I have no option but to withhold my signature from it, and to cherishing the hope that its beneficial objects may be attained by a resort for the necessary powers to the same wisdom and virtue in the nation which established the Constitution in its actual form and providently marked out in the instrument itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest.
That's really a lot of words to say that he didn't like this particular bill, and hoped Congress would figure out a different way to achieve the same fundamental objects. His veto was unsurprisingly sustained, as the margins in both chambers were rather narrow to begin with (86-84 in the House and 20-15 in the Senate). To suggest this is dispositive of anything is really dumb.
Yet it is a teachable moment. Madison did shit like this a lot, objecting to something on constitutional grounds, but finding a way to support pretty much the same thing done with a twist so as to not offend his sensibilities. We'll revisit that in just a bit.
What really annoys me about these things is the notion that Madison's view of our imperfect frame of government trumps anybody else's, as though the Constitution sprung forth solely from his head, fully formed like Athena emerging from Zeus'. Yet the entire document is a compromise, with many hands (like James Wilson's) in its writing, not to mention ratification (people like Hamilton in the pro column, future president Monroe against).
By the time Madison was handing the White House keys over to Monroe, there had already been ample precedent that the United States could indeed undertake internal improvement projects like building roads and canals. Construction of the Cumberland Road, for example, was authorized in 1806, and the first contracts were awarded in 1811 (guess who was president at the time?).
What's more, Jemmy said the following in his annual message of 1815:
Among the means of advancing the public interest the occasion is a proper one for recalling the attention of Congress to the great importance of establishing throughout our country the roads and canals which can best be executed under the national authority. No objects within the circle of political economy so richly repay the expense bestowed on them; there are none the utility of which is more universally ascertained and acknowledged; none that do more honor to the governments whose wise and enlarged patriotism duly appreciates them. Nor is there any country which presents a field where nature invites more the art of man to complete her own work for his accommodation and benefit.
These considerations are strengthened, moreover, by the political effect of these facilities for intercommunication in bringing and binding more closely together the various parts of our extended confederacy. Whilst the States individually, with a laudable enterprise and emulation, avail themselves of their local advantages by new roads, by navigable canals, and by improving the streams susceptible of navigation, the General Government is the more urged to similar undertakings, requiring a national jurisdiction and national means, by the prospect of thus systematically completing so inestimable a work; and it is a happy reflection that any defect of constitutional authority which may be encountered can be supplied in a mode which the Constitution itself has providently pointed out.
A year after Madison's veto, during James Monroe's first term, the House debated a report concluding "[t]hat Congress has power, under the Constitution, to appropriate money for the construction of post roads, military, and other roads, and for the improvement of water courses." This was approved 90-75 on March 14. That's as far as that went, with everybody feeling they'd made their point, so it was ordered to lie on the table, and immediately after that, they went to work on new appropriations for...the Cumberland Road.
In 1822, Monroe told Congress:
Good roads and canals will promote many very important national purposes. They will facilitate the operations of war, the movements of troops, the transportation of cannon, of provisions, and every warlike store, much to our advantage and to the disadvantage of the enemy in time of war. Good roads will facilitate the transportation of the mail, and thereby promote the purposes of commerce and political intelligence among the people. They will by being properly directed to these objects enhance the value of our vacant lands, a treasure of vast resource to the nation. To the appropriation of the public money to improvements having these objects in view and carried to a certain extent I do not see any well-founded constitutional objection.
Just a couple years later, SCOTUS ruled in Gibbons v Ogden:
It is the power to regulate, that is, to prescribe the rule by which commerce is to be governed. This power, like all others vested in Congress, is complete in itself, may be exercised to its utmost extent, and acknowledges no limitations other than are prescribed in the Constitution...If, as has always been understood, the sovereignty of Congress, though limited to specified objects, is plenary as to those objects, the power over commerce with foreign nations, and among the several States, is vested in Congress as absolutely as it would be in a single government...
The wisdom and the discretion of Congress, their identity with the people, and the influence which their constituents possess at elections are, in this, as in many other instances, as that, for example, of declaring war, the sole restraints on which they have relied, to secure them from its abuse. They are the restraints on which the people must often they solely, in all representative governments.The power of Congress, then, comprehends navigation, within the limits of every State in the Union, so far as that navigation may be in any manner connected with "commerce with foreign nations, or among the several States, or with the Indian tribes."
Within about a month, Congress had passed the General Survey Act of 1824, and Army engineers started surveying, designing, and otherwise working on roads, canals, etc. Almost exactly two centuries passed, and here's the Biden administration continuing the practice of helping states with their bridges and other infrastructure.
So Madison didn't approve a bill. That really has fuckall to do with how our modern republic operates, and the fact remains that other members of the founding generation disagreed with his opinions (which sometimes evolved!) at various points.
He objected to a bill regarding subsidies for cod fisheries, got pushback, then ended up voting for it (please read that old post because it took forfuckingever to find in the Internet Archive). He was also against providing aid to French citizens fleeing the Haitian revolution, which imma linger on a while.
This one's fun because it's a favorite of conservatives who hate helping people. They like to cite this from House debate on January 10, 1794:
Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.
That comes from Elliot's Debates (which reports things quite differently than the House Journal, but no matter), and usually is left to stand alone without a fuller context:
Though he was of opinion that the relief contemplated could not be granted in the way proposed, yet he supposed a mode might be adopted which would answer the purpose without infringing the Constitution.
Sound familiar? Just as with the internal improvements, he was basically saying, "I like what you're trying to do, I just don't think you're doing it right." Yet even the Father of the Constitution couldn't carry the day, as the bill passed, and was approved by President Washington just over a month later. So I guess what he thought wasn't all that.
But wait, there's more! After the 1812 Caracas earthquake caused great devastation, Congress proposed $50,000 in aid. President James Madison approved the measure on May 12.
Facts change. Times change. Perspectives and interpretations change. What one Framer said one time is potentially interesting, but fundamentally irrelevant to what we undertake today.
Selah.