The Constitution’s Framers had given the Senate power to block legislation, to stand as the rampart against the exercise of popular and presidential will. This power was only a negative power, a naysaying power, the power to obstruct and to thwart. But it was an immense power—and the Framers had built the rampart solid enough so that it was standing, thick and strong, in the twentieth century as it had stood in the nineteenth century.
