This Just in – Washington and Lincoln get their own combined holiday including sales and school vacations, but for my money it is the 4th President of the United States who deserves much more attention and gratitude for what he gave this country.
On this day is 1751 in the colony of Virginia, James Madison was born to a prominent slave-holding family (an unearned stain on his record). He served in the Virginia House of Delegates and the Continental Congress leading up to and during the Revolutionary War.
Through pursuing his higher education, Madison came to develop an interesting political theory. He asserted that we have the right to be happy.
A legally protected and fundamental right to find happiness was brand new. It was radical. In the time when the colonies had declared their independence from the British throne, Madison argued for a federal government whose authority would supersede that of the states in The Federalist Papers – the basis for our Constitution.
The story of the drafting of the Constitution is complicated and the more you read about it, the more certain it seems that it cannot succeed. Surely the conventional wisdom at the time threw around observations of “unprecedented” and cited the high probability of failure as a reason not to try to create this new model of self-governance with checks and balances.
Against all odds, they did this thing. This impossible, unprecedented thing. They created a new form of government with limits on its power. They created a controlling document that started “We the people …” written most prominently in case the reader might not grasp the point right away.
Under this framework, which has generally strengthened over 200+ years of trials and tribulations, the Executive and Judicial Branches are about to bring a former President of the United States to justice for crimes he committed during and after his term in office.
There is much consternation that the Congress impeached but failed to remove Trump from the presidency for his abuses of power and attempt to illegitimately retain control of the government. The legislative branch is listed first in Article One in Madison’s Constitution, but in this pursuit, it is a weak player – empowered only to remove the president from office, not to send him to prison or convict him criminally.
We return to “We the people.” Justice is done with rights ensured and without political angles. Juries decide what the evidence shows and judges rule on points of law. Justice is a human endeavor and never perfect, but ordinary citizens acting in good faith will decide what should happen to citizen Trump.
That last thing – ordinary citizens deciding his fate, is the exact thing that Trump most fears. He can’t flatter, bully or threaten them as he did indirectly with so many witnesses who testified about the Trump-led insurrection. He will sit there, forced to be silent, and listen as evidence is presented.
The results will be whatever they will be, but bringing Trump before a judge and jury for all of us to watch will be an exercise in accountability that he has never experienced, except perhaps across the table from Speaker Pelosi.
None of this could happen without the vision of James Madison, creating structure and balance in how our federal government was created. Happy birthday, James Madison.
Jean Bolduc is a freelance writer and the host of the Weekend Watercooler on 97.9 The Hill. She is the author of “African Americans of Durham & Orange Counties: An Oral History” (History Press, 2016) and has served on Orange County’s Human Relations Commission, The Alliance of AIDS Services-Carolina, the Orange County Housing Authority Board of Commissioners, and the Orange County Schools’ Equity Task Force. She was a featured columnist and reporter for the Chapel Hill Herald and the News & Observer.
Readers can reach Jean via email – jean@penandinc.com and via Twitter @JeanBolduc
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