Having discussed at length the first two design features of the energetic executive, Alexander Hamilton turns in Federalist No. 73 to a very brief consideration of the third, “an adequate provision for [the] support” of the president. He means the provision in the Constitution (Art. II, § 1, cl. 7) that ensures that the president will be paid a salary that cannot be altered during his four-year term in office. (Presidential pay raises have thus always taken effect upon the commencement of the next term of office.) Compensation is established by law; laws are made by Congress; and “a power over a man’s support is a power over his will.” So the Constitution guarantees that Congress can exploit neither the president’s “necessities” nor his “avarice.”
But this subject takes up only two paragraphs of the essay. The balance of No. 73 is devoted to the presidential veto (a word, by the way, that Hamilton never uses here, preferring the noun “negative”). In keeping with the Federalist’s overall concern for the independence of the separated powers, Hamilton first discusses the “qualified negative” of the executive as a form of “constitutional arms for its own defence.” Only thereafter does he mention the veto’s purpose as “an additional security against the enaction of improper laws,” including those prompted by “an impulse unfriendly to the public good.” This broad, policy-based account of the veto’s purposes explodes arguments later made by partisans of the legislative power who claimed that the only proper ground for a president’s veto was that a bill that passed the Congress was unconstitutional. (There is even a persistent myth to this day that Andrew Jackson was the first to employ the veto for reasons other than constitutionality. Not so. George Washington–the first in so many things–was first here too.)
Hamilton does not envision the veto as a rare event, and in good conservative fashion thinks it is hard to imagine it being overused: “The injury which may possibly be done by defeating a few good laws will be amply compensated by the advantage of preventing a number of bad ones.” But what will make presidents willing to use the power with a vigorous frequency? Precisely the fact that it can be overridden by Congress. “Instead of an absolute negative, . . . the qualified negative . . . is a power, which would be much more readily exercised than the other.” A veto that cannot be overridden amounts to a constitutional confrontation every time it is used–and may come to be seen as a constitutional crisis. But the qualified veto, which can be reversed by extraordinary majorities in the Congress, is an invitation to reconsider a legislative act declared to be unwise by the chief executive. “In proportion as it would be less apt to offend, it would be more apt to be exercised, and for this very reason it may in practice be found more effectual.”
In standard British constitutional theory, I believe the Crown is still held to possess an absolute veto over acts of Parliament–what is called “withholding the royal assent.” Next year will be the tricentennial of the last occasion on which the power was used, when Queen Anne vetoed a bill regarding the Scottish militia in 1708. That occasion was already 80 years past when Hamilton wrote, in an era when the modern parliamentary reforms had not yet rendered the monarchy virtually toothless in other respects. Hamilton knew the cause of the rarity of the royal veto–that it was a sledgehammer, when a subtler tool is actually called for.
(For explanation of this recurring feature, see here.)