IN HIS "EVENING JEMMY" post of May 15, 2014, the generally estimable Charles Pierce gave what was for a professional scribbler this rather self-serving gem of Madison's wisdom:
Hence, in the United States the great and essential rights of the people are secured against legislative as well as against executive ambition. They are secured, not by laws paramount to prerogative, but by constitutions paramount to laws.
This security of the freedom of the press requires that it should be exempt not only from previous restraint by the Executive, as in Great Britain, but from legislative restraint also; and this exemption, to be effectual, must be an exemption not only from the previous inspection of licensers, but from the subsequent penalty of laws.
James Madison, Report On The Virginia Resolutions, 1800.
Consider, first, that by Madison's own design and plot, "the great and essential rights of the people" were not secured by either the law or constitution. By his own design the rights of all Black People were not protected by either and he certainly had no intention that they should be, ever. Something that the odious Chief Justice Taney used a half century later in the infamous Dred Scott decision. That attack on the rights of Black People is, by conscious intention and planning embedded so deep within the Constitution that it's effective, still today. So Madison was not only lying, he was transparently lying, something which may have not occurred to propertied, white men not in on the plot in1800 but which no one today has any right to ignore or excuse or even excuse by coming up with an explanation of why he was such a hypocrite.
You can't claim that Madison and his fellow aristocratic framers were ignorant of those issues. For him and I dare say most of those delegates to the Convention, those issues were the overwhelming center of contention and concern, the very issues that motivated the blackmail of the slave interests - South and North to install inequalities and injustices into the Constitution what, as Madison said, was "paramount to laws" laws, which would far more easily be made and unmade as their evil or mere lack of wisdom became apparent than the Constitution could be changed. So they proved by their concern they were fully aware of those who pointed out the injustice or evil of the inequality that he took for granted because in the wheeling and dealing he and the other "founders" engaged in during the Constitutional Convention, the insistence of the slave owner to rig things so that even a majority of voting propertied white men could not get rid of slavery or even vote for restrictions of it for twenty years after the blasted thing was adopted and not even then if they chose not to exercise the power otherwise given to control commerce.
That out of the way the subsequent history of the country, ESPECIALLY THE INNOVATION OF SUPREME COURT REVIEW OF LAWS MADE BY CONGRESS, proves that the Constitution as a guarantor of rights was more often than not nothing of the sort, the Constitution which held no such right belonged to the Court did nothing to protect the country from that extra-Constitutional "law" which no legislature passed, no executive signed onto.
We are in a period when Republicans are doing what even some of the Northern states have done since shortly after the Constitution came into being, making laws preventing Black People from voting, of rigging elections through making it hard for people to vote, to restrict voting in ways designed to fix elections and congressional districts - something which the Constitution has not only not prevented but permitted, aside from a brief period when a law, the Voting Rights Act was in effect, UNTIL IT WAS OVERTURNED BY REPUBLICAN-FASCISTS ON THE SUPREME COURT THE CONSTITUTION BEING THE EXCUSE THEY HAVE USED TO DISENFRANCHISE PEOPLE OF COLOR AND OTHERS. The Constitution is dangerously vague if not totally silent on the right of a qualified citizen to vote in an election and to have their vote counted, it is dangerously vague if not totally silent on the right of all of us in the country to have an honest election that puts into office those with the support of a majority of the voters and, as important, does not impose the last choice of a majority on all of us through having one of those win with a minority of voters support, as someone who suffered under the 38% governorship of the filthy, evil Paul LePage for two terms under those conditions, our Constitution is way oversold by Madison and even today, by the far more honest, far wiser, far more informed by the lessons of the past two centuries and more, Charles Pierce.
And that is not to get to the rest of this bit of idiocy in which merely because someone has the money to own an organ of the media, they are freed from the inspecificity of Madison's horribly written "Bill of Rights". A Bill of Rights that has permitted billionaires, millionaires and even foreign fascist despots to lie us into the worst presidency of our lifetimes if not for all times, one who mounted a violent insurrection against the very Congress that Madison feared might inconvenience the press,and which has allowed the gun industry to mount a shooting, killing war on us harnessing the most prone to paranoid violence to serially gun down thousands and thousands of us, even the youngest school children.
No, we have to get over "Jemmy" and Tom Jefferson, goddamned Alexander Hamilton whose death by Aaron Burr must have been widely recognized as removing one of the most dangerous anti-democrats among that crew of aristocratic haters of the very idea of universal suffrage and equality. The entire myth of "the Founders" is one of our most dangerous, matching and perhaps surpassing the myth of "the lost cause" and "the wild west" and various other regionalist lies that dupe the country into installing the criminal and the depraved into office.
That's a hell of a huge cost to We The People so that people who scribble for magazines and newspapers and who shoot off their mouths for television and radio and online are relieved from the work of fact checking their claims to make sure they aren't slandering or libeling someone. Something they should do out of those "professional ethics" that they claim to work under, something they should have to abide by so they don't lie us into rule by gangsters and thugs and fascists and billionaire oligarchs. It's what they claim is important about the over rated, over touted "freedom of the press." That's only a good thing the extent to which they tell the truth and don't lie, but it's part of their mythology that it's always a good thing and to be unexamined and tested for the truth.
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