Column: What James Madison would tell Grover Norquist

• A commitment is a straitjacket a candidate chooses to put on himself.

American politics has a pledge problem, and Grover Norquist isn't the only offender. In addition to Norquist's anti-tax increase pledge, there is the liberal Contract for the American Dream of MoveOn.org, plus a host of additional pledges for and against both abortion rights and and gay marriage.

Is all this pledging a good idea? No, said James Madison, and the Founding Fathers agreed.

In England and the British colonies, representatives routinely received "instructions" from citizens that bound them to vote for or against certain measures.

This practice did not go unchallenged. In 1766, Massachusetts Lt. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson argued strenuously against the rights of Massachusetts towns to "instruct" their representatives: "To hold each representative to vote according to the opinion of his town ... contradicts the very idea of a parliament the members whereof are supposed to debate and argue in order to convince and be convinced."

Nonetheless, under the Articles of Confederation, which governed U.S. politics in the aftermath of the Revolution, states reserved the right to recall their "delegates" (as they called them) if they did not vote as they were told.

This political tradition was rejected by the Founding Fathers, who did not include in the U.S. Constitution either a "right to instruct" or a "right to recall" disobedient legislators. When a representative to the First Congress from South Carolina introduced a constitutional amendment affirming a binding "right to instruct," it was soundly defeated in both houses.

A check on powers?

Defenders of instructions saw this tradition as an affirmation of popular sovereignty and a much-needed check on representative power. But Madison, an author of the Federalist Papers and the principal architect of the Constitution, disagreed. Representative power is checked by frequent elections, he argued. Any instructions states might offer to their federal representatives should be seen as merely advisory. "That instructions are binding on the representatives," he concluded "is of a doubtful, if not of a dangerous, nature."

So what does all this have to do with the current mania for pledges and the rapidly approaching "fiscal cliff"?

Colonial and early national instructions are admittedly different from modern-day pledges. A pledge is a straitjacket a candidate puts on himself while an instruction is a straitjacket that citizens put on their representatives. Nonetheless, the lessons learned in our early experiments with republican government still apply.

In our founding debates about instructions, we decided we did not want a government in which "delegates" were sent to the Capitol simply to do the bidding of others. We wanted House and Senate members to represent the interests of the nation, not just those of their states or districts. And we wanted our representatives to deliberate with one another, "to convince and be convinced," and to compromise in order to get things done.

Delicate balance upset

All this is to say that our early republic struck a balance between popular sovereignty and what Madison called "a due sense of national character." Pledges disrupt this delicate balance, turning "representatives" into "delegates" who take their marching orders from Grover Norquist or MoveOn.org.

According to Christopher Terranova, author of an exhaustive law review article on the history of legislative "instructions," even the conservative icon Edmund Burke disobeyed instructions sent to him by his constituents when he in his judgment saw fit.

Conservatives today need to follow Burke's example, and the examples of Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., and others who have indicated that they will disregard their anti-tax increase pledges if the good of the country demands it.

Back in 1789, Madison posed this rhetorical question on the House floor: Suppose a representative "is instructed to patronize certain measures, and ... he is convinced that they will endanger the public good; is he obliged to sacrifice his own judgment to them?"

His answer was, of course, no.

Stephen Prothero is a Boston University religion professor and the author of The American Bible: How Our Words Unite, Divide, and Define a Nation.

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