The Federalist Party enters these excerpts not as a subject in its own right but as background to two discussions of American political institutions: the history of court packing and the operation of the Electoral College. In both cases the party is named in passing, and the excerpts supply no account of its founding, its program, its leading figures beyond John Adams, or its dissolution.
Adams, the election of 1800, and the judiciary
In the September 2020 episode on court packing, Bob Zadek raised the Federalist Party while pressing his guest on how far back the tactic of enlarging or loading the federal judiciary goes. Zadek described John Adams, whom he called his favorite founder, as having lost the election to his former friend in 1801 and, in his last days in office, having used the fact that his party, the Federalist Party, controlled the legislature to pack the court. Zadek characterized this as loading up the federal judiciary with the selection of one party to protect that outgoing party’s political philosophy, and said it shows how far back the tactic goes, literally to the first decade after the founding Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020).
Josh Blackman agreed, identifying the episode as the famous election of 1800, which he described as one of the first major contested presidential elections. In his account, Jefferson won the Electoral College and Adams lost reelection, and on his way out Adams made a number of what were called lame duck appointments, filling the courts, both the lower courts and the US Supreme Court, with justices. Blackman said this proved very controversial, and singled out Adams’s most famous appointment, John Marshall, whom he called the great Chief Justice and who was confirmed shortly before Jefferson took office. Marshall would serve more than 30 years on the court, a tenure Blackman called stunning Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020).
Blackman drew a general lesson from the episode: from the very beginning of the Republic, presidents recognized the importance of federal judges and tried to put as many of their people on the court as possible, either before or after the election, so that in some regards nothing is new under the sun. Zadek returned to the point to argue against the notion that manipulating the size or composition of the Supreme Court is unprecedented. He said it is easy, in 2020, to imagine this is the first time it is happening and to ask how politicians could be so cynical as to play with the number of the Supreme Court, but that Adams, one of the lions of the founding era, had no difficulty whatsoever packing the Supreme Court. In Zadek’s reading, the founders, at least one founder and his supporters in 1800, saw nothing especially unconstitutional about the technique; it was built into the constitutional structure at least by omission, because nothing changed that Eight-Dimensional Chess (2020).
The excerpt breaks off at that point, at a section heading on administrative versus political changes, with Zadek’s name and no further text. Nothing after that point is available.
Federalist electors in 1796
The Federalist Party also appears, once and briefly, in the August 2022 episode with Ilya Somin, in the course of a discussion of the Electoral College. Somin argued that the system has never worked the way some of the founding fathers thought it would, in which voters who might not know who would make a good president would choose better-informed members of their community to do the actual choosing. He dated the failure from the very first seriously contested presidential election in 1796 onward, and said that even then, almost everyone who voted was not thinking of an individual elector but of Adams versus Thomas Jefferson. His illustration of the intended-but-unrealized design was a voter saying he is not voting for Joe Schmo, the Federalist Party elector for Delaware, but for John Adams or Jefferson The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Somin added that the electors themselves are, with rare exceptions, ciphers chosen by their political parties and chosen deliberately so that the person will be almost certain to cast an electoral vote for the candidate of their party rather than go rogue. He said that in the entire history of the Electoral College there have been only a relative handful of examples of an elector going rogue, and that it has never actually changed the outcome of an election The Libertarian Dream Team - Ilya Somin (2022).
Across episodes
The two episodes do not argue the same question about the Federalist Party. The 2020 episode uses Adams and the Federalist-controlled legislature as a precedent in a debate about court packing; the 2022 episode mentions a Federalist elector only as an illustration of how voters have always treated the Electoral College as a choice between candidates. The excerpts show no development between the earlier and later treatment, and no shared thesis about the party itself.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not state when the Federalist Party was founded or dissolved, what it stood for, who led it besides Adams, or how it organized. They do not describe the Judiciary Act of 1801, the number or names of Adams’s appointments beyond Marshall, or the legal fate of those appointments. They do not say what Marshall’s tenure consisted of, what the election of 1800 turned on, or how the 1796 election was decided. Everything the excerpts offer on the party is incidental to arguments about court packing and the Electoral College.