Requiem for James Madison

Academics have been offering excuses for not teaching the founders for decades. Perhaps it is not because the framers are irrelevant and dated but because they are all too eerily relevant.

Take James Madison, for example. “The preservation of a free Government requires not merely, that the metes and bounds which separate each department of power be invariably maintained; but more especially that neither of them be suffered to overleap the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people,” James Madison stated. “The Rulers who are guilty of such an encroachment, exceed the commission from which they derive their authority, and are Tyrants.”

“The People who submit to it are governed by laws made neither by themselves nor by an authority derived from them, and are slaves.”

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