Federalist 39: James Madison's Confusing Sales Job
Read all entries in my series on The Federalist Papers here. Well. No wonder we're so confused. My writing partner Ben Boychuk and I had the pleasure of interviewing author Ron Chernow this week. He wrote the acclaimed new biography of George Washington, along with an earlier bio of Alexander Hamilton -- he knows something, in other words, about the founding of this country. In our discussion, Chernow repeated his assertion ( first made in a New York Times op-ed ) that today's Tea Partiers are wrong to claim an exclusive ideological heritage descended from the Founders. In truth, Chernow said, the Constitution was a compromise between competing visions of government -- powerful or limited? Instead of actually settling the question, the Founders fudged it a bit, so that the arguments of the 21st century aren't so different from the 18th. Nowhere is that tension more evident, perhaps, than in James Madison's authorship of Federalist 39 . Madison's intent her