Adrienne Koch famously described Madison and Jefferson’s fifty-year political relationship as the “great collaboration.” Gordon Wood later called theirs the greatest collaboration in American political history. Few scholars would disagree with these assessments. The Federalists themselves were accustomed to refer to Madison as the General and Jefferson as the Generalissimo of the emerging Republican Party, […]
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Removing “by blood”: Context and Politics in the Cherokee Supreme Court Decision to Alter the Constitution
On March 25th, 2021, I published an article in The Conversation offering a brief overview of the Cherokee/U.S. struggle over defining tribal citizenship. The Cherokee Supreme Court in February 2021 unilaterally struck the words “by blood” from the Cherokee Constitution, ostensibly granting Freedmen the right to run for tribal office – a right they already […]
In Defense of the Two-Party System
One of the most widely criticized elements of America’s political system is its winner-take-all, first-past-the-post principle that leads to the domination of two political parties. “The Two-Party System Broke the Constitution,” writes The Atlantic. Foreign Policy argues that “the only way to prevent America’s two-party system from succumbing to extremism is to scrap it altogether.” […]
Reinterpreting the Declaration of Independence: Congress Debates the Missouri Admission Crisis
As Missouri closes its nearly three-year commemoration of the bicentennial of our tumultuous entrance into the Union, numerous books and articles have re-examined this pivotal event in American history. One such publication, entitled Contesting the Constitution: Congress Debates the Missouri Crisis, 1819-1821, examines the constitutional issues involved in Missouri’s struggle for statehood. This collection of […]
The Shrinking Extended Republic: Can Madison’s Constitutional Design Survive the Modern Mass Media?
Contrary to much of the often-heated rhetoric we hear at times, the American Constitution was not adopted for the purpose of limiting the power of the federal government. We already had, under the Articles of Confederation, a federal government of limited powers. The Constitution was adopted for the purpose of increasing the power of the […]
