"It first glance such fears seem virtually unfounded, but there is an erie modernity to these antifederalist concerns"

THE MAN WHO MAY BE our finest living historian on these topics,  the Constitutional scholar and historian Paul Finkelman,  in his 1984 review of "The Complete Antifederalist" listed some of the things the antifederalists predicted would be possible under the proposed Constitution which, in fact, turned out to be very true.  I'm going to give you a good part of that passage asking you to see what is glaringly obvious,  most of what he noted had already happened under the Constitution WITHOUT THE SUPREME COURT OR ANYONE ELSE STOPPING IT has been repeated under Trump.  BUT NOW WITH SUPREME COURT APPROVAL.   The Roberts Court has made what would have seemed a few years ago to be a wild warning by that hot-headed revolutionary   Patrick Henry the law of the land through their six-three amending of the Constitution.   

I will note that I have copied this with the computer and that's asking for problems of line justification.  I'll try to fix that but I can't promise to catch all of it. 

How might the Constitution "totally destroy the liberties" of America? Some antifederalists feared the presidency, a position that combined the responsibilities of the nation's civil executive with those of commander-in-chief of the Army, while allowing for unlimited terms in office. Patrick Henry looked at the Constitution and did not see the "beautiful features"  that James Madison saw. Henry told the Virginia ratifying convention, "when I come to examine these features, Sir, they appear to me horridly frightful: Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints towards monarchy .. . Your President may easily become King .... "

Others worried about the Senate whose members would serve long terms without any check on them by the people. Many antifederalists predicted that the Senate would become an aristocracy. Because the Senate possessed executive and judicial, as well as legislative, roles, that body seemed especially dangerous. Henry warned, "Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed by what may be a small minority; and a very small minority may continue forever unchangeably this Government, athough horridly defective." 

Even the House of Representatives was too remote for some antifederalists. In their view, that body consisted of too few members for it to be truly representative of the people. 

It first glance such fears seem virtually unfounded, but there is an erie modernity to these antifederalist concerns. Is the modern imperial presidency any different from the one the antifederalists feared? Even the War Powers Act  has not prevented an American president from sending troops to Lebanon and Grenada. Without such a law, a secret war in Cambodia and Laos was fought for many years. And the imperial presidency has not been confined to foreign affairs. With a single order, Franklin Roosevelt incarcerated nearly 100,000 American citizens for three and a half years.  As the antifederalists might have predicted,even the Supreme Court lacked both the moral authority and the moral sensitivity to object.  The use of federal troops to suppress strikes in the nineteenth century and veterans protesting the depression during the 1932 Bonus March are yet other examples of what the antifederalists feared. If there are few such instances of this type of behavior in our nation's early history, it may be because the fears of the antifederalists remained alive until the Civil War. If there are more instances in recent years, it may be because a less well-read and less historically aware America has forgotten the warnings of antifederalists.

If you don't get an eerie feeling noticing the repeating, beyond rhyming, of history with the past eight months under Trump,  you are as stupid as the majority of the Roberts Court and the Republican-fascist majority in the Senate.    The same review by the same reviewer 41 years later could fill paragraphs, with little doubt including the crimes of Bush II and the Rehnquist Court's Bush v Gore decision.   Such things are coming far more often and in far more extreme forms as we go on in the Constitutional order. 

Anyone who has read much of what I've written might notice that I have always stressed the importance of equality as THE absolute foundation of legitimate democratic government,  leaving the far more widely noted matter of liberty in the background.   That's not because I don't value that thing which the antifederalists as well as the federalists were always harping on,  "liberty" but because, as the Constution has allowed all of those evils listed in that very partial list made by Paul Finkelman,  it has given "liberty" out in the most grotesquely unequal way,  over-complete liberty to rich, white men over the most basic rights of Black People, other People of Color, Women, Children,  WORKERS.  Note that what Trump is doing with federal troops now was done UNDER THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER to keep workers from organizing in the past, most of whom were poor, white men and women.    That was among the greatest evils of the Constitution, that it was founded and continues to promote inequality favoring the very same small minority which the framers favored.   Any time in our history when  partial progress towards equality and against the original reading of the Constitution was made,  in abolishing slavery through the civil war,  the Supreme Court can be counted on to knock it back if not down entirely as the Roberts Court is doing in nullifying the Voting Rights and  Civil Rights Acts.    That is the role that the Court has played AGAINST LAWS DULY ADOPTED BY THOSE SUBJECT TO THE VOTE, over and over again in our history.    That is why I have noted that the Supreme Court has been, since at least 1803 when it gave itself the Marbury power to do that,  MAKING THE PREDICTIONS OF "BRUTUS" THE LAW OF THE LAND.   

Now that the Roberts Court is outdoing the Taney Court, the Court of Plessey v Ferguson, the Courts that totally distorted the 14th Amendment out of any sense of its original meaning,  it's time to face the fact that no hard won progress towards equality or even rational government is going to be safe while the Supreme Court as it stands now retains its ability to do what was warned about in Brutus 15.

I will point out that the extreme rightists in the Roberts Court majority know that they cannot depend on what they want being had and secured through democracy,  maybe not even through the gerrrymandered, rigged-election Congress holding up through the various financial crises, recessions and depressions that have brought Democrats into the majority there, so they want the presidency to have the very powers of a king which the antifederalists warned it would always have a tendency to be.  It is one of the things that has been noted that third-world countries which followed a presidential system instead of a parliamentary system had a greater chance of becoming dictatorships.  I think it is worth considering that it was the antifederalists who predicted such a tendency,  not the federalists who won through the most dubious of means*. 

I'll call your attention to this part of Brutus 15 that I'll focus on more later. 

The power of this court is in many cases superior to that of the legislature. I have showed, in a former paper, that this court will be authorized to decide upon the meaning of the constitution, and that, not only according to the natural and obvious meaning of the words, but also according to the spirit and intention of it. In the exercise of this power they will not be subordinate to, but above the legislature. For all the departments of this government will receive their powers, so far as they are expressed in the constitution, from the people immediately, who are the source of power. The legislature can only exercise such powers as are given them by the constitution, they cannot assume any of the rights annexed to the judicial, for this plain reason, that the same authority which vested the legislature with their powers, vested the judicial with theirs — both are derived from the same source, both therefore are equally valid, and the judicial hold their powers independently of the legislature, as the legislature do of the judicial. — The supreme court then have a right, independent of the legislature, to give a construction to the constitution and every part of it, and there is no power provided in this system to correct their construction or do it away. If, therefore, the legislature pass any laws, inconsistent with the sense the judges put upon the constitution, they will declare it void; and therefore in this respect their power is superior to that of the legislature. In England the judges are not only subject to have their decisions set aside by the house of lords, for error, but in cases where they give an explanation to the laws or constitution of the country, contrary to the sense of the parliament, though the parliament will not set aside the judgment of the court, yet, they have authority, by a new law, to explain a former one, and by this means to prevent a reception of such decisions. But no such power is in the legislature. The judges are supreme — and no law, explanatory of the constitution, will be binding on them.

*  Read the review by Finkelman for only some of the examples of the rigging of the ratification process by the federalists.   Here's one that should remind you of recent events by the Republican-fascists in that most emblematic of "liberty loving" states,  Texas.

The third procedural issue, like the first, centered on the legality of the process. Storing asserts that the argument that the Convention lacked legal power to write a new Constitution "became less pertinent every day simply because the Constitution was in fact before the people."'  The process of ratification emerged as an even more dangerous factor, however. In Pennsylvania, for example, the state assembly voted to call a ratification convention before the Congress (meeting in New York at the time) had even transmitted the Constitution to the states.

On the penultimate day of the session, the pro-Constitution "Republicans, enjoying a temporary majority in the Assembly, pressed for immediate action.''50 Those opposed to the Constitution argued that a decision on when and how to choose delegates to a ratifying convention should be postponed until after the election of the new legislature set for the following month. The antifederalists advocated delay on the grounds that the Constitution was not officially before the assembly, and that the people of the state deserved the opportunity to read the proposed Constitution and vote for or against assembly members on the basis of that document. When the temporary federalist majority rejected these arguments, the antifederalist members of the assembly boycotted the last session in order to prevent a quorum. The next day, a mob forced two of the assemblymen back to the chamber in order to establish a quorum, and the call for a convention was approved. 

If this behavior on the part of the federalists reflected the tenor of politics to be expected under the new Constitution, it is understandable that many people feared an impending end to liberty.

The process of ratification of the Constitution was hardly less crooked in many of the other states,  Massachusetts - of which my state was then a part - was very much in line with the kind of vote rigging that Trump and the Republican-fascists want to make the law of the land right now.