The Federalists Reloaded | No. 27
Who Are They Serving?
There is a line in Federalist 27 that ought to make every elected official in America sit up a little straighter. Hamilton writes, “I believe it may be laid down as a general rule that their confidence in and obedience to a government will commonly be proportioned to the goodness or badness of its administration.” Strip away the 18th-century phrasing, and the point is direct: people obey government not simply because it has power, but because they believe it is legitimate enough to use that power. Citizens can fight their government and still believe the system belongs to them. Once that belief breaks, opposition becomes alienation.
That is the burden of Federalist 27. Hamilton is answering the fear that the proposed Constitution would require military force to enforce federal laws. His critics worried that a stronger national government would become distant and dangerous, especially when it acted directly on the people. Hamilton did not answer by pretending power was harmless. He argued that power is less dangerous when it flows through regular order, wise administration, and public confidence. When government earns legitimacy, it has “less occasion to recur to force.”
The warning for our time is that public trust does not collapse all at once. It erodes when citizens come to believe the rules are written to protect those in power rather than hold them accountable. Once that belief takes hold, every decision begins to lose moral force. They may be legal, but they no longer represent the people.
From the Sword to the Law
Hamilton has spent the previous essays walking through the hard problem of power. In Federalist 23, he argued that a government responsible for national defense must have the authority to defend the nation. In Federalist 24 and Federalist 25, he pushed back against the idea that liberty could be preserved by pretending danger would politely wait outside the gates until Americans reached consensus. Then, in Federalist 26, he turned to civilian control and the question that sits near the heart of every republic: if the sword must exist, who controls it?
Federalist 27 moves from the sword to the law. Hamilton is no longer only asking if the Union will have enough power to act. He is asking whether national authority will be accepted as lawful rather than foreign. His answer is that federal power should operate through ordinary legal channels, so that obedience becomes part of civic life rather than a recurring confrontation. The laws of the Union, he writes, would become “the SUPREME LAW of the land,” and state officers would be bound by oath to support them. If these powers were administered with “a common share of prudence,” he believed there was “good ground to calculate upon a regular and peaceable execution of the laws of the Union.”
That phrase, “a common share of prudence,” is the hinge. Hamilton was not promising wise government. He was warning that lawful power still depends on restraint. Citizens can accept defeat when they believe the rules are fair and the next contest is real. But when the political class rewrites those rules to protect itself, it creates two systems: one in which politicians change the rules to get the results they want and another in which citizens must live with those results.
When the Rules Serve Power
Redistricting belongs here because it tests whether representation still runs from the people to the government, or from those in power down to the people. Hamilton was not writing about congressional maps, voter files, or consultants using software to carve communities into partisan shapes. But he was writing about public confidence, and that confidence breaks when politicians draw the rules of representation to protect themselves.
A district should begin with the people who live there: their towns, neighborhoods, shared problems, and common interests. Too often, mapmaking now begins with the desired outcome and the voters needed to secure it, then rearranges communities until they serve the result. Elections still happen, but representation shifts away from the people and toward the mapmakers. A small group of people gets to dig a moat around the castle of power, hollowing out representative government in the process.
The danger grows when politicians meet gerrymandering with more gerrymandering. One side redraws for advantage, the other retaliates where it can, and both insist they are only correcting the other’s abuse. That may work as a talking point, but it is a lousy form of self-government. In that cycle, voters stop being citizens and become pieces to move.
Mid-decade redistricting makes the motive impossible to hide. Redistricting is supposed to follow the census, when population changes require states to adjust district lines. When politicians redraw maps between censuses, they are trying to win through process what they fear they cannot win in November.
When politicians can redraw maps whenever they want a better deal, constituents become movable assets, kept as long as they're useful and discarded when inconvenient. That breaks the basic bargain of representative government: elections should be won by persuading voters, not rearranging them. If politicians can keep changing the electorate, they never really have to answer to it.
Why Competitive Districts Matter
A close district keeps a politician from getting too comfortable. They cannot spend all their time preaching to people who already agree and calling that representation. They have to explain themselves to voters who still need to be persuaded. Competitive districts do not make politics noble, but they make it harder for representatives to confuse their supporters with the public.
Safe districts pull politics in the opposite direction. When the general election is effectively decided before it starts, the primary becomes the real threat, and the representative’s world gets smaller. Winning trust across the district matters less than avoiding punishment from the most intense voters in one party. Over time, that changes who runs for office, how they talk, and what they do once they get there.
The people back home are still there, but they no longer carry the same weight. The job starts to bend toward a national political world that rewards performance over accountability. Talking to constituents becomes part of the show, while the real relationships form far outside the district.
In a republic this large, the collapse of competitive districts should worry us. When most races are decided before November, the voters’ voice is silenced before the ballot is even cast. That is not self-government. It is a system learning how to protect itself from the people it is supposed to represent.
The Guardrails Are Weakening
The Supreme Court has made the redistricting fight more volatile. In Louisiana v. Callais, the Court rejected Louisiana’s congressional map, which created a second majority-Black district, and found that the state had relied too heavily on race. The case puts two principles in tension: the Voting Rights Act protects voters from minority-vote dilution, while the Constitution limits how far states may go in using race to draw districts.
Some argue that race-based districts should disappear altogether. That debate deserves serious treatment. But if states replace race-conscious districting with openly partisan districting, they have not made the process more representative. They have only changed who benefits from the manipulation. A map built to protect political control does not serve the people simply because officials stop naming race as the rationale.
The Court did not repeal the Voting Rights Act, and we should not describe the ruling that way. But the decision narrows one of the remaining guardrails in redistricting fights. It gives states less room to answer vote-dilution claims with race-conscious districts, and it gives partisan mapmakers more room to test the boundaries. That is where a legal ruling becomes a political accelerant. It changes what states may do, and it invites political actors to push harder.
Weakened guardrails change behavior. Once parties sense more room to draw aggressive maps, restraint starts to look like surrender. Each side treats the other’s escalation as justification for its own excess. The result dilutes representative government under the false promise that everyone will return to the norms later. Each new map becomes the baseline for the next fight, and legal permission hardens into political insulation.
The Two Systems
The system creates the temptation. The same politicians who benefit from the rules often have the power to shape the conditions under which they keep office. Without restraint, the rules stop checking ambition and start serving it. Rules meant to protect the people start protecting the people already in charge.
Every faction can convince itself that its cause is too important to lose. Once that belief takes hold, politicians stop treating defeat as part of republican life. They turn it into a danger to be engineered away. They defend the tactic as necessary and dismiss restraint as surrender because they cannot trust the other side. That is how the political class builds two systems of rules: one in which citizens must accept the result, and another in which politicians keep adjusting the contest.
A republic cannot hold that bargain forever. Its legitimacy depends on the belief that the office is temporary and that a losing side can return by persuading enough people next time. The system does not require parties to like each other, but it does require both sides to accept competition as real. Redistricting attacks that belief by telling voters the map may matter more than persuasion.
A safe district turns the general election into a ceremony. It teaches candidates to please the right people rather than earn public trust, while voters learn that a legal map can still fail the basic test of representation. Too many politicians understand that problem clearly until the new lines protect them.
Who Are They Serving?
That is the question at the center of this essay. When politicians draw a district to secure a preferred outcome, they do not build it around the voter. They build it around the result they already want. When politicians redraw maps mid-decade and rearrange communities to chase another seat, the answer becomes hard to avoid: too often, the system serves those trying to keep control of it.
Hamilton’s point in Federalist 27 was that authority depends on confidence. People are more likely to accept government when they believe it is acting lawfully, prudently, and fairly. Redistricting abuse runs counter to that because it weakens accountability, strengthens party control, and helps politicians avoid defeat.
A map that delivers more seats may help win a speakership or protect a majority, but it also teaches citizens a dangerous lesson: politicians can treat representation as another tool of control. The same tactic celebrated in office becomes the abuse denounced in opposition. The public sees the pattern, and every new map becomes permission for the next one.
Federalist 27 still matters because law can give government authority, but only public trust can make it last in a free society. That trust weakens when citizens believe their representatives are sorting and managing them instead of answering to them.
A district drawn to protect a party does not give citizens a voice; it gives the party control. And a republic cannot remain free for long when those in office become more committed to protecting their position than answering to the people.
