| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Daniel Wirls and Stephen Wirls. The Invention of the United States Senate. (Interpreting American Politics.) Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2004. Pp. x, 274. $18.95.
Unicameral legislatures are today the norm among democratic nations. Daniel Wirls and Stephen Wirls additionally note that "most bicameral legislatures have upper houses that are less powerful or less consequential in comparison to the lower house" (p. 3). The U.S. Senate, by contrast, possesses both constitutional autonomy and institutional legitimacy independent of the U.S. House of Representatives. The Senate also exercises its distinct powers in politically consequential ways in the production of annual budgets and legislative acts with the House, the approval of treaties and executive appointments with the president, and the selection and confirmation of members of the federal judiciary. Moreover, until the adoption of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, which provided for popular election of U.S. Senators, the composition of the Senate was defined by the explicit preferences of each state legislature, thereby linking the U.S. Senate to the most powerful set of political actors outside of the federal government. From this perspective, as James Madison claimed in 1787, the U.S. Senate appears as "the great anchor" of the U.S. government. This book aims to provide a detailed history and analysis of this legislative body's theoretical and practical predecessors, the deliberations and original design decisions made at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, and the Senate's early development as a working legislative institution. Although many steps taken along this path cover familiar terrain, no previous work offers an account that ties the theoretical and practical origins of the Senate with its early institutional development. Wirls and Wirls prove to be able guides and their journey worthy of our efforts.	1
Between an introductory chapter and a thoughtful concluding chapter, Wirls and Wirls successfully engage their intended objectives in six intermediate chapters. In chapter two, they observe that early national debates concerning the purposes of a senatorial body drew from the intersection of three overlapping yet often competing constitutional discourses on mixed constitutionalism, liberalism, and republicanism. Here the authors offer the reader the benefits of reengaging the ideas of Cicero on virtue, Polybius on political balance despite corruption, John Locke on natural, foundational personal rights, Montesquieu on separation of powers and liberty, James Harrington on a bicameral, pre-Rawlsian decision logic, and David Hume on the benefits of legislative-executive coordination. The authors never lose contact with their focus on the idea of a senate, but they wisely resist the temptation to map parts of their review of these theoretical sources onto the original intentions or design of the U.S. Senate.	2
Chapter three reviews postrevolutionary American debates on bicameralism and early state constitutional designs. In addition to the influential defense of bicameral legislatures by John Adams, Wirls and Wirls summarize the institutional features adopted in the design of state senates before 1787, recovering portions of the ground previously described in detail by M. J. C. Vile, Jackson Turner Main, Gordon Wood, Marc Kruman, and others. To their credit, Wirls and Wirls offer a critical analysis of Madison's pre-Convention ideas in which they correctly underscore several internal ambiguities in his thinking regarding the design of the senate—especially with regard to the Virginia Plan's weakest and most illogical proposal to create a small senate along with a new proportional rule for apportioning representation within Congress. Either Madison miscalculated or misunderstood the effects of this combination or his nationalism was ineffably open to altering state divisions as New Jersey delegate David Brearly suggested at the Convention. Either way, as I have argued elsewhere, this inconsistency in Madison's original design opened the floor for critics of the Virginia Plan and, ultimately, the Great Compromise and the Convention's subsequent completion of the U.S. Constitution.	. . .

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