“The heads of departments are chief clerks.  Instead of being the ministry, the organs of the executive power, and imparting a kind of momentum to the operation of the laws, they are precluded even from communicating with the House by reports....  Committees already are the Ministers and while the House indulges a jealousy of encroachment in its functions, which are properly deliberative, it does not perceive that these are impaired and nullified by the monopoly as well as the perversion of information by these committees.”

Justice Story, who entered Congress in 1808 as a Jeffersonian Republican, noted the process of degradation, and in his Commentaries he pointed out the cause:  “The Executive is compelled to resort to secret and unseen influences, to private interviews and private arrangements to accomplish its own appropriate purposes, instead of proposing and sustaining its own duties and measures by a bold and manly appeal to the nation in the face of its representatives.”

The last of the organic acts of the session was the one establishing the judiciary.  The student will be disappointed if he examines the record to note whether there was any vision of the ascendancy which the judiciary was to obtain in the development of the American constitutional system.  The debates were almost wholly about the possibilities of conflict between the state and the federal courts.  Although Maclay’s diary gives a one-sided and distorted account of the proceedings in the Senate, the course of the debate is clear.  Ellsworth of Connecticut had principal charge of the bill.  At the outset Lee and Grayson of Virginia made an ineffectual effort to confine the original jurisdiction of the federal courts to cases of admiralty and maritime jurisdiction, and argued that jurisdiction over other cases involving federal law might be conferred upon state courts.  This was a point on which there had been some difference of opinion between Hamilton and Madison.  The former held that it was within the competency of Congress, when instituting tribunals inferior to the Supreme Court, to adopt the state courts for that purpose.  Madison held that nothing less than a system of federal courts quite distinct from the state courts would satisfy the requirements of the Constitution.  When the bill was taken up in the House, there was a long debate over this matter.  The costly duplication of judicial establishments that has ever since existed in the United States is certainly not necessary to a federal system, but is an American peculiarity.  The advocates of a unified system were hampered by the fact that this view was pressed by some in a spirit of hostility to the Constitution.  The decisive argument was the untrustworthiness of the state courts.  Madison urged this fact with great force and pointed out that in some of the States the courts “are so dependent on the state legislatures, that to make the federal laws dependent on them, would throw us