Madison’s Warning

Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"

The Republican War against your right to vote. Over the next few months the entire book will be here, new chapters posted every Sunday, for subscribers to read at no cost. If you want to get a physical book to mark up or share with others, just click on the picture above, visit your local bookstore, or check your favorite online seller.

Madison’s Warning

Looking back, although about half of the founders were practicing their own form of voter suppression as slaveholders, most held egalitarian values for the future of this country and worried obsessively about a takeover by the very rich. It’s hard to imagine that they’d ever sanction interpreting the First Amendment as a license for billionaires and corporations to buy our political system (as the Supreme Court first did in 1976 in the Buckley v. Valeo case and then supercharged in 2010 with Citizens United v. FEC).

In the summer of 1785, James Madison was essentially running the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and he gave a speech (you can read it in his Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787) about the importance of not allowing the new country they were forming to become an oligarchy that was run of, by, and for the rich.24 He said in a 1788 speech that there were “two cardinal objects of Government, the rights of persons, and the rights of property.”25 He added that if only the rights of property were written into the Constitution, the rich would ravage the few assets of the poor. “Give all power to property,” he said, “and the indigent will be oppressed.”

In fact, Madison noted, all the former republics that they had studied in his five years of preparation for writing our Constitution had ended up corrupted by the political power of concentrated money. “In all the Governments which were considered as beacons to republican patriots and lawgivers,” he said, “the rights of persons were subjected to those of property. The poor were sacrificed to the rich.”

Thus, wanting to establish a country where the rich didn’t end up running it as their own private kingdom or oligarchy, he proposed that the House of Representatives—the only branch elected directly by the people, and every two years at that—should solely have the power to raise taxes and spend federal funds. And he didn’t want the ability to vote for members of Congress to be limited to those who owned property. When that had happened, in previous governments, Madison pointed out, “the poor were sacrificed to the rich.”

“The time to guard against this danger is at the first forming of the Constitution,” he said in his speech. “Liberty not less than justice pleads for the policy here recommended. If all power be suffered to slide into hands [of property owners],” he warned, the American citizenry would “become the dupes and instruments of ambition, or their poverty and independence will render them the mercenary instruments of wealth. In either case liberty will be subverted; in the first by a despotism growing out of anarchy, in the second, by an oligarchy founded on corruption.”

And, indeed, the delegates assembled agreed. Only the House of Representatives, to this day, can raise taxes and spend money.

In a 1787 letter to Edward Carrington, Jefferson wrote, “It seems to be the law of our general nature, in spite of individual exceptions; and experience declares that man is the only animal which devours his own kind, for I can apply no milder term to the governments of Europe, and to the general prey of the rich on the poor.”26

In an 1816 letter to Samuel Kercheval, Jefferson explained, “I am not among those who fear the people. They, and not the rich, are our dependence for continued freedom.”27 He added that if we ended up with an oligarchic government that was run, directly or indirectly, by the rich, America’s working people “must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four. . . and the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they [poor Europeans] now do, on oatmeal and potatoes; have no time to think, no means of calling the mismanagers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains on the necks of our fellow sufferers.”

One wonders how the employees of the giant corporations that throw so much money at the Republican Party would compare that metaphor with their own current existence, since the GOP has successfully fought any meaningful reform of union rights, universal health care, or the minimum wage since the Reagan administration.

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Part Two exposes the concerted strategy that transformed America into an oligarchy that serves the rich, and not we, the people.