ABSTRACT
Americans have always been concerned that narrow private interests,whether based in religion, ideology, partisanship, or profit, mightovercome the broad public interest. The founding generation, led by James Madison, worried that highly motivated groups of citizens, like the commercial elites in the cities, or the holders of government debt, might work to skew government policy to their benefit and to the detriment of the broader public. Madison famously defined “factions,” what we would call interest groups today, as “a number of citizens, whether amounting to a majority or minority of the whole, who are united by . . . some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to . . . the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.”1
