As politicians threaten the independence of the judiciary and arrogate the power of the legislature over all other branches, maybe some remedial reading is in order?
by Shaun Kenney
After a rather shocking โ and by shocking, I mean disappointing โ exchange on social media with a sitting Virginia state senator regarding his misuse of Federalist 51 to insist that the legislature outweighs the other two branches of government, it dawned on me that this particular individual has perhaps never actually read the Federalist Papers much less Federalist 51.
A few things out of the gate. The Federalist Papers were written to describe the limitations on the federal government vis a vis the United States Constitution, not the state constitutions themselves. Madison is widely believed to have written Federalist 51, and though he argues that because the legislative branch is the more powerful precisely because it is accountable to the people, he does not argue that it is superior to the other branches of the federal government.
In fact, the nature of legislative power being as such, Madison argues that the check on this power is a bicameral legislature โ one being directly elected by the people themselves (the U.S. House of Representatives) to represent the demos and the other being elected by the state legislatures (the U.S. Senate) so as to represent the aristos. Of course, the 17th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution eliminated the U.S. Senate as imagined by the Founding Fathers, and the state constitutions โ though protected by the 10th Amendment โ are presently subject to federal understandings of right and law as the 14th Amendment progressively restricts the statesโ ability to infringe upon rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.
If you have never read the Federalist Papers, or if the last time you bumped into them was either in a high school or college classroom, there are a handful that are considered requisite reading:
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