I finished Ron Chernow’s “Washington” over Shabbos. It was a fantastic book overall, but there was one point made in the book that particularly bothered me.

When discussing Washington’s political positions during his presidency, Chernow described Washington as someone who believed in the Constitution as a “living document.” This fundamentally misinterprets the Hamiltonian perspective on the Constitution at that period in time.

When one thinks that the Constitution is a “living document,” one thinks of the outspoken perspectives of Woodrow Wilson and Louis D. Brandeis to create the presumption that the Constitution can bend to the wills of an increasingly progressive idea of centralized government.

That’s not what Hamilton et. al. believed: The crux of Hamiltonian constitutionalism was a belief in using a more active executive branch in order to help the nation prosper *within the confides of what is necessary and proper* given the rigid republican structure of government.

Neither Washington nor Hamilton believed in deviating from the institutionalized structure of the government to promulgate expansive powers outside the Constitution, but rather wanted the executive branch to push the ball forward in policies that made government more effective.

Even Madison, a staunch critic of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton during their respective tenures within the hierarchy of the executive branch, came to understand the necessity of specific federalist-leaning projects in order to further the powers of the federal government.

As such, that interpretation is still *narrow* with respect to how far the executive branch can exercise power compared to the Wilsonian interpretation of the Constitution that has been popularized more so over the past century to the great proportion of jurists today.

Thus, Chernow was incorrect in claiming that Washington would have assented to a modern interpretation of the Constitution that he would have dramatically opposed.