Who Is James Madison?

My VIP for this week is Founding Father James Madison. Donald J. Kochan posted an article at The Daily Signal saying that James Madison was the “OG” of DOGE. He explained as follows.

[Last] week in 1788, Madison’s Federalist No. 62 was published in The [New York] Independent Journal.

The essays we know collectively today as The Federalist Papers, each authored under the pseudonym Publius by Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, have stood the test of time as not only fundamental to our interpretation of the Constitution, but also to identify the evils it was designed to guard against.

Federalist No. 62 was directed at a defense of the proposed Senate composition, election process, and term length.

Madison explained that the features of the Senate would guard against too voluminous and too frequently changing laws. While discussing the utility of six-year terms as a way to incentivize legislators to have a long, reflective view, Madison explained the extended term would inject stability in the production of law.

It would minimize the inevitable mutability of laws historically exhibited in systems that the Founders studied with too constant and frequent change in the personality of the legislature.

Most importantly for today is the complementary lesson from the essay on what that means for the rule of law.

Put simply, Madison in Federalist No. 62 recognized that the creation of voluminous laws and regulations, a primary effect of a too mutable set of legislators, “poisons the blessing of liberty itself.”

And here is where his warnings in 1788 mirror our concerns with the regulatory state today: Reflecting on history and prescient about the nature of humans and their institutions, Madison’s critical enduring paragraph in Federalist No. 62 explains the danger.

He wrote: “It will be of little avail to the people, that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood; if they be repealed or revised before they are promulgated, or undergo such incessant changes that no man, who knows what the law is to-day, can guess what it will be to-morrow. Law is defined to be a rule of action; but how can that be a rule, which is little known, and less fixed?”

The "laws” we have today and how they might apply are little known to Americans when they are buried in an avalanche of millions of pages of often incoherent regulatory jargon in the Federal Register that cannot be understood….