James Madison
http://sandefur.blogspot.com/2004_03_14_sandefur_archive.html
[excerpt]
Madison was born in 1751 in Orange, Virginia, about an hour from Monticello
in today’s cars. He was one of ten children, and although Madison never had
children himself, his brothers and sisters would fill his home with nieces
and nephews, so that Montpelier was always a busy place. Where many
Virginians, like Thomas Jefferson, went to college at William and Mary in
Williamsburg, Madison attended Princeton in New Jersey. There he fell under
the tutelage of John Witherspoon, a Calvinist writer and preacher who was
also very knowledgeable about political philosophy. As Ralph Ketcham
writes, . . .
[snip
Madison quickly saw that the primary fault in the Confederation was that it
operated more as a treaty than as a government. It operated, as Alexander
Hamilton would later say, on “STATES or GOVERNMENTS, in their CORPORATE or
COLLECTIVE CAPACITIES, and as contradistinguished from the INDIVIDUALS of
which they consist.” This meant that American sovereignty was ambiguous—was
it in the nation, as the Declaration claimed? Or was it “retained” in the
states, as the Articles of Confederation claimed? Madison was the primary
advocate of a new ratification of the Constitution, not by the state
legislatures, but by special ratification conventions, so that while the
Articles were “derived from the dependent derivative authority of the
legislatures of the states…this [Constitution of 1787] is derived from the
superior power of the people.” Speech in the Virginia Ratification
Convention, (June 6, 1788), in Jack Rakove, ed., Madison: Writings 362
(1999). The Constitution would therefore change the sovereignty of the
union—it would be ordained and established by the “people of the United
States.” After the Philadelphia Convention, when Madison was a delegate to
the Virginia Ratification Convention at Richmond, Patrick Henry challenged
Madison on this point:
give me leave to demand, What right had they to say, We, the people? My
political curiosity, exclusive of my anxious solicitude for the public
welfare, leads me to ask, Who authorized them to speak the language of, We,
the people, instead of, We, the states? States are the characteristics and
the soul of a confederation. If the states be not the agents of this
compact, it must be one great, consolidated, national government, of the
people of all the states.
Madison replied,
I can say, notwithstanding what the honorable gentleman has alleged,
that this government is not completely consolidated, nor is it entirely
federal. Who are parties to it? The people—but not the people as composing
one great body; but the people as composing thirteen sovereignties. Were
it, as the gentleman asserts, a consolidated government, the assent of a
majority of the people would be sufficient for its establishment; and, as a
majority have adopted it already, the remaining states would be bound by
the act of the majority, even if they unanimously reprobated it. Were it
such a government as is suggested, it would be now binding on the people of
this state, without having had the privilege of deliberating upon it. But,
sir, no state is bound by it, as it is, without its own consent. Should all
the states adopt it, it will be then a government established by the
thirteen states of America, not through the intervention of the
legislatures, but by the people at large. In this particular respect, the
distinction between the existing and proposed governments is very material.
On this point, Madison was inflexible for his entire life. Although some
have argued that Madison’s authorship of the Virginia Resolutions
contradicts his position on this matter, Madison himself did not believe
so. For one thing, when Jefferson sent Madison drafts of his Kentucky
Resolutions, in which Jefferson argued that the Constitution was simply a
league between sovereign states, and that the states had the right to
nullify federal laws that exceeded the federal authority, Madison wrote
back in a cautionary tone: “Have you ever considered thoroughly the
distinction between the power of the State and that of the Legislature, on
questions relating to the federal pact[?] On the supposition that the
former is clearly the ultimate Judge of infractions, it does not follow
that the latter is the legitimate organ especially as a Convention was the
organ by which the compact was made.” Letter to Thomas Jefferson (Dec. 29,
1798) in 2 The Republic of Letters: The Correspondence between Thomas
Jefferson and James Madison 1776-1826 at 1085 (J. Smith ed., 1995). Forty
years later, after Jefferson’s death, when the Nullification Crisis banged
the drum for the coming of the Civil War, Madison wrote furiously against
the nullifiers and against their claim that Madison’s Virginia Resolutions
created a precedent for such nullification. As Drew McCoy writes in his
outstanding book on Madison’s retirement years, The Last of The Fathers:
James Madison And The Republican Legacy (1995), “The nullifiers were
undertaking nothing less than a fundamental redefinition of the Union, and
Madison knew it…. The doctrine of nullification, he warned, ‘would convert
the federal government into a mere league which would quickly throw the
states back into a chaos out of which not order a second time but lasting
disorders of the worst kind could not fail to come.’” Id. at 132-34.
[end excerpt]
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You are invited to check out the following:
The Rise of the Theocratic States of America
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocracy.htm
American Theocrats - Past and Present
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/theocrats.htm
The Constitutional Principle: Separation of Church and State
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
[and to join the discussion group for the above site and/or Separation of
Church and State in general, listed below]
HRSepCnS · Hampton Roads [Virginia] SepChurch&State
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HRSepCnS/
[Its not just Hampton Roads folks who are members, there are members from
all over the US and a couple from overseas as well]
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.. . . You can't understand a phrase such as "Congress shall make no law
respecting an establishment of religion" by syllogistic reasoning. Words
take their meaning from social as well as textual contexts, which is why "a
page of history is worth a volume of logic." New York Trust Co. v. Eisner,
256 U.S. 345, 349, 41 S.Ct. 506, 507, 65 L.Ed. 963 (1921) (Holmes, J.).
Sherman v. Community Consol. Dist. 21, 980 F.2d 437, 445 (7th Cir. 1992)
.. . .
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USAF LT. COL (Ret) Buffman (Glen P. Goffin) wrote
"You pilot always into an unknown future;
facts are your only clue. Get the facts!"
That philosophy 'snipit' helped to get me, and my crew, through a good
many combat missions and far too many scary, inflight, emergencies.
It has also played a significant role in helping me to expose the
plethora of radical Christian propaganda and lies that we find at
almost every media turn.
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THE CONSTITUTIONAL PRINCIPLE:
SEPARATION OF CHURCH AND STATE
http://members.tripod.com/~candst/index.html
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