An Immediate Dependence on the People

November 3, 2026: voters did what the Founders built the House to let them do every two years.

On election night, the Speaker of the House stood in front of his party and explained what had just happened to it. Keeping the majority, he said, would have meant defying “more than a century of midterm history.”

He was right. In the last ninety years, the President’s party has gained House seats in a midterm exactly three times: 1934, 1998, and 2002. Nearly every other time it lost ground. This year it lost both chambers, the first time since 2006 that the party out of power took the House and the Senate on the same night.

It is tempting to treat that pattern as a law of political physics. Voters get restless. The party in power overreaches. The pendulum swings.

All true. All beside the point. The midterm is not an accident of the calendar. It was constructed to do exactly what it did on Nov 3.

In the summer of 1787 the delegates in Philadelphia argued over how often the House should face the voters. Some wanted one-year terms. An old American maxim, which Madison quoted in Federalist 53, held that where annual elections end, tyranny begins. Others wanted three years. They settled on two.

Madison explained why in Federalist 52. “The House,” he wrote, should have “an immediate dependence on, and an intimate sympathy with, the people.” Frequent elections were “unquestionably the only policy” by which that dependence could be secured.

Not good character. Not ethics boards. Not the press. Elections, and often.

In Federalist 57 he answered critics who warned that the House would harden into an aristocracy. His answer was the calendar. Members would be “compelled to anticipate the moment when their power is to cease,” when their conduct would be reviewed and they would have to “descend to the level from which they were raised.”

That is a fair description of what happened to a good many members on November 3.

Now notice what the Founders did with the timing. The President serves four years. The House serves two. Every President therefore faces a national verdict halfway through his term without his own name on the ballot. The voters cannot remove him. They can change the branch that checks him.

That is the midterm’s real job. It feels like a referendum on the President, and this year the President asked for exactly that, telling his voters to pretend he was on the ballot. They took him at his word. More than four in ten told exit pollsters they voted to express opposition to him for a variety of reasons.

But the deeper meaning is not partisan. A national majority unhappy with the direction of its government had a lawful, scheduled, peaceful way to say so. It used it. Nobody marched on anything. The machine worked as written.

Readers of this publication have seen the principle before. In November 1776, while the army was collapsing around New York, the Maryland convention wrote that a long continuance in executive power is dangerous to liberty, and that rotation is one of the best securities of permanent freedom. The House was the Founders’ rotation machine. Every two years, whether anyone wants it or not, the whole thing goes back to the people.

Here is the uncomfortable part, for everyone.

A midterm can rotate Congress. The problem is that it cannot touch the people who write most federal rules. There are no midterms at the agencies. A career official at the EPA, the SEC, or the Department of Labor faced no voters on November 3 and will face none in 2028. Whatever the country said last week, the regulatory machine kept running on the same rails it ran on November 2.

That is the administrative state’s quiet advantage. Madison’s theory rested on the idea that power would flow from people who could be fired by voters. Every function moved from Congress to an agency is a function moved out of the midterm’s reach which is a very serious problem for the future of this country.

But the election did two things. It changed who sits in Congress. And it handed the new majority a question that majorities of both parties have dodged for most of a century.

Will they use the powers Article I gives them? The power to declare war or refuse it. The power of the purse. The power to investigate. The power to confirm or reject. The power to write the laws instead of delegating them.

Or will they hold hearings, give speeches, and let the executive and the agencies keep governing, the way their predecessors did?

The Founders built a House that had to answer to the people every two years. They assumed it would want its own power, and would fight to keep it. That assumption is about to be tested by a Congress with fresh majorities, a President promising to veto everything they send him, and a war nobody declared.

The voters did their part. The calendar did its part.

The rest belongs to the branch they just rehired.

If you enjoyed this article, you’ll love the documentary.

Thread of Liberty follows the entire thread of the American experiment — from ancient Rome and the Puritans, through the Revolution and the Constitution, to Tocqueville, Lincoln, Calvin Coolidge, and the modern Administrative State.

Watch the full feature documentary at ThreadofLiberty.com