Twenty years ago, during a visit with my daughter in Poughkeepsie, we drove up the Hudson Valley to dine at the Hyde Park Brewing Company and then sip coffee at Bread Alone before catching a movie at Upstate Films in picturesque Rhinebeck, New York.
The brew pub is a hop across US 9 from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s estate, and they honor him with a toast: FDR–Ferment, Drink, Repeat! Their menu affords them the right to talk like that, and I’ve been trying to match the maple-glazed sesame salmon ever since. Wolfed it down so fast that I blame it for the ample time we had between coffee and film on a cold and wet January evening.
No problem. We found a bookstore in Rhinebeck called Oblong where we could browse for a half hour. Not wanting to leave without a purchase, I picked up an eight-dollar paperback (about $13 today), a reference book that every opinion-page columnist should have.
So it is that for twenty years a copy of The Federalist Papers has been at my side along with a collegiate dictionary, a King James Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, a world atlas, and a Rand McNally US road atlas.
While the other five have fallen out of use due to the immediacy offered by the internet–for finding Zimbabwe, knowing how to spell it, and knowing just when it stopped being Rhodesia (1979); for knowing the difference between capital and capitol, and when to use a capital C for Capitol, a dire national need as we just learned; for knowing whether to comma, or not to comma to be, or not to be; for distinguishing between a mountain named in Matthew and those who fought on horseback in the Civil War, if not how to contort the two into a bizarre legal defense–this compendium of American history continues to serve me well.
If you can forgive an aside: In what has already been dubbed “the Cavalry Defense,” I wonder who is on horseback leading the charge: Paul Revere & Teddy Roosevelt? John Wayne & Ronald Reagan? Annie Oakley & Oprah Winfrey?
Be that as it may, in addition to the 85 essays penned by Hamilton (51), Madison (29), and Jay (5), the book includes copies of the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, and the Articles of Confederation. What makes it most valuable is that the Constitution is notated, clause by clause, with the page numbers of the relevant passages.
We often hear that the Supreme Court debates “what the founders intended,” and many of its 5-4 and 6-3 decisions over the years prove that there is often no clear answer–especially with the advance of time and the appearance of technology making it ever-less certain.
This book connects every clause in the Constitution to at least one passage where one of the founders explains its intent, offering immediate access to the same phrases from which Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia drew diametrically opposed conclusions. Look at the margin, and you’ll see where to find what was said of them in 1787-88.
Admittedly, my copy saw little use through the W. Bush and Obama years when my few forays into Constitutional subjects were mostly on the First and Second amendments. No cross references there, as the Bill of Rights followed the Federalist Papers.
Enter Mar-an-Ego in 2016 when the Electoral College contradicted the popular vote. Then came 2017 when he dismissed all evidence of foreign influence, followed by 2018 when he ridiculed the word “emoluments” at his rallies, followed by 2019’s abuses of power. My copy of the Papers was opened nearly as often as my refrigerator door those three years, but that was nothing compared to 2020 which began with impeachment, was flush with attempts to suppress and nullify votes, and ended with an attempt to invalidate an election.
Did you know that Madison described a postal service “of great public conveniency” in Federalist 42?
For all the sensation of the sixth day of 2021, the most fascinating Constitutional issue stemming from it has barely been raised: Statehood for DC, a subject with two separate clauses in the Constitution and references in five Federalist essays.
This month it was an impeachment trial in which Ego’s defense emphatically dismissed the idea that any Constitutional provision–not just impeachment–could possibly be based on British precedent. His lawyer wanted us to think that the Democrats might as well be giving the country back to King George III. He certainly did not want us to peruse the Federalist Papers where we would find dozens of citations of precedents set in English law as far back as the Magna Carta in 1215, not to mention a few to ancient Rome. Papers regarding the judiciary, from 79 through 83, all cite English law.
For all the attention to so many Constitutional points, the one that proved most decisive was never mentioned. The founders created a senate which was not elected by the people, but chosen by the US Representatives from each state. The reason for this and for the longer six-year terms appears in Federalist 62: They wanted the more “deliberative body” to make decisions free of any concern for re-election–same reason Supreme Court judges have life-time appointments.
In 1913, the 17th Amendment changed that, mostly for the better. Last weekend, however, we paid the price of an unintended consequence.
Suffice to say the book has more than served its purpose, although I hope to give it some rest for at least four months if not four years. I’m considering sending five dollars to Oblong in Rhinebeck, but I’m more likely to wait for another trip to the Hudson Valley when I can hand-deliver the adjustment for inflation–and burn another $50 in Hyde Park–even if it is decidedly more.
The founders would call that an amendment. They gave us the process to amend their document as time and circumstance might demand. They used it ten times themselves. They described it in Federalist 39, 40, 43, and 76.
Taken as a whole, the Federalist Papers and the Constitution form a functioning process. That favorite toast down the road in Hyde Park captures that process as vividly as it does organically.
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Mouth of the River 