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Second Federalist: Congress Creates a Government

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The greatest threat to American liberty, prosperity, and national security today comes not from outside our borders but from within; it is our own ignorance of the ideas that made our country great. In Federalist No. 51, Madison warned us "a dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government." While our Founders framed our Constitution that pit the several branches of government, both state and federal, against each other to limit the concentration of power, they knew that these paper chains could only restrain the ambition of our governors as long as common people understood, and stood up for, the rights the Constitution was designed to protect. Today, we have slid so far that the words of the Constitution are often twisted to reach exactly the opposite result they were designed to achieve. The only way to know this is to examine the original intent of the Founders as expressed in their own speeches and writing. The Federalist Papers are, of course, the primary source for understanding the Constitution. But these works, written to persuade our forefathers of the sensibleness of the Constitutional design, could not anticipate the subtle arguments that real world greed and ambition would devise against the Constitution's plain language. This is where Hyneman's A Second Federalist fills the gap. No sooner than the Constitutional plan was put into action did controversies arise over the powers granted to both state and federal governments. A Second Federalist presents these challenges in the words in which they were framed, and the responses of America's great early statemen, many of them signers of the Constitution themselves. A single example is all that is necessary to prove the worth of the book. Today, big government politicians regularly justify our massive welfare state and the process of wealth redistribution - using the law to steal - with the "general welfare" clause of the Constitution's preamble. Madison himself answered this trick when it was tried in 1792, and Hyneman presents the text of Mr. Madison's floor speech in the House of Representatives refuting the claim the federal government had power to redistribute wealth. Unfortunately for America, the ideas of Mr. Madison, the Father of the Constitution, have lost the debate today. But if we are ever to return to the understanding of the Constitution possessed by the men who wrote it, it will only be because of excellent books like Mr. Hyneman's A Second Federalist. Buy two copies of this book and give one to a friend.