Tribute To James Madison

Floor Speech

TRIBUTE TO JAMES MADISON -- (House of Representatives - March 20, 2007)

Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to pay tribute to the longevity and the genius of our Nation's Constitution and to one of the principal framers of this incredible document, James Madison.

As a member of the Constitutional Caucus, I want to do my part in sharing with people each week here items about the Constitution that we think, in the caucus, are very important.

Madison understood the almost insurmountable task that drafting a Constitution presented to the Constitutional Convention. After the Constitution was completed, Madison looked back at the ideals that were contained in it and marveled that that body as diverse as the Constitutional Convention could have produced a document that did so much to preserve liberty and provide for a form of government that would stand the test of time.

He wrote in Federalist Paper No. 37 that ``among the difficulties encountered by the Convention, a very important one must have lain, in combining the requisite stability and energy in government with the inviolable attention due to liberty and to the republican form. Without substantially this part of their undertaking they would have very imperfectly fulfilled the object of their appointment or the expectation of the public.''

This founding member of our government knew that there would be a tension between granting maximum liberty to the people and ensuring that the government was given the capacity to execute its critical duties. The greatness of the preamble to the Constitution rests in part in how eloquently and succinctly it enumerates these duties to ``establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty.''

Madison wrote: ``The genius of republican liberty seems to demand, on one side, not only that all powers should be derived from the people, but that those entrusted with it should be kept in dependence by the people by a short duration of their appointments; and that even during this short period the trust should be placed not in a few but in a number of hands. Stability, on the contrary, requires that the hands in which the power is lodged shall continue for a length of time the same. A frequent change of men will result from a frequent return of electors, and the frequent change of measures from a frequent change of men. Whilst energy in government requires not only a certain duration of power, but the execution of it by a single hand.''

He knew what we take for granted today, one, that liberty is an essential ingredient for stability and prosperity; and, two, that if government does not see its foremost task is to preserve liberty for the people it serves, then it will soon fail.

In discussing the preamble we should pause to take note of the fact that our Constitution was the result, not of monarchial fiat or one man's scheme to craft a new government, but of a Constitutional Convention, a body overflowing with competing philosophies and conflicting viewpoints. But these founders found common ground in our Constitution. Madison was in awe of this reality. ``The real wonder,'' he wrote, ``is that so many difficulties should have been surmounted and surmounted with a unanimity almost as unprecedented as it must have been unexpected. It is impossible for any man of candor to reflect on this circumstance without partaking of the astonishment. It is impossible for the man of pious reflection not to perceive in it a finger of that almighty hand which had been so frequently and signally extended to our relief in the critical stages of the revolution.''

Madison notes that the Convention's end product, our Nation's Constitution, would not have been possible under the normal conditions that prevail in most political bodies. It makes me wonder if such an achievement could ever be possible in today's fractious climate. But Madison chalks this achievement up to two dynamics. He writes: ``The first is that the Convention must have enjoyed in a very singular degree an exemption from the pestilential influence of party animosities, the diseases most incident to deliberative bodies and most apt to contaminate their proceedings. The second conclusion is that all the deputations composing the conventions were either satisfactorily accommodated by the final act or were induced to accede to it by deep conviction of the necessity of sacrificing private opinions and partial interest to the public good and by despair of seeing this necessity diminished by delays or by new experiments.''

His observations on the crafting of this great document which establishes our framework for government and secures the blessings of liberties to ourselves and our posterity should serve to remind us of how careful we must be to adhere to the boundaries it creates for the Federal Government. His insight into the process behind the framing of our Constitution might also remind the Members of this body of our duty to serve the people and to maintain, as Madison said, ``a deep conviction of the necessity of sacrificing private opinions and partial interests to the public good.''

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