Read Madison's Music for Free Online Page B

United States is not caused by some perverse form of American exceptionalism. It is the predictable cumulative impact of legally imposed transaction costs on voting. Were we to simplify and update election administration, require the government to assemble the voting rolls, permit Election Day registration, and make Election Day a holiday, the problem of a morally unacceptable third tier would dramatically diminish. Nonparticipation would continue, of course. But it would be at a far lower rate, and, most important, it would no longer be radically skewed by race and class.
    Ask yourself this very troublesome question: is the real reason we tolerate so many unnecessary hurdles to voting that, deep down, we don’t want the poor to vote? Have we found the ideal hypocritical way to limit the franchise—formally guarantying everyone the right to vote, but under such a lukewarm, indeed hostile, standard of legal protection that we tolerate, indeed invite, regulatory hurdles that predictably disenfranchise the poor in large numbers, allowing us to blame them, not us, for the continued exclusion of the poor from American political life?
    The justices all claim to understand Madison’s central First Amendment message: that vigorous political speakers and well-informed voters are the indispensable core of a robust democracy. Indeed, in recent years, Justice Breyer has argued in dissent that the underlying purpose of the First Amendment, indeed the entire Constitution, is to make democracy work. In the name of protecting vigorous speakers, however, the current Court has uncoupled the Free Speech Clause from its democracy-supportive context, ignored three of the ten words in the clause, and construed the remaining seven to elevate the interests of wealthy speakers over the interests of everyone else. The challenge is to build on the Court’s rhetorical acceptance of the relationship between informed voters and democracy, to develop a democracy-friendly First Amendment based on all forty-five words of Madison’s full text. Read with careful attention to the parts and the whole, as one would read a great poem, those forty-five words effectively protect the essentials of a democracy: the right to vote, the right to be a truly informed voter as opposed to a pawn, the right to enjoy fair representation via contested elections, and the right to participate equally in a democratic process free from manipulation by the very rich.

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    Madison, the Reluctant Poet
    How the Great Poem Almost Didn’t Get Written
    The story of the textual evolution of the Bill of Rights during that febrile summer of 1789 makes it difficult, if not impossible, to claim that the structure and organization of the Bill of Rights was driven by a single person’s vision. 1 Madison didn’t even want to produce a single, coherent Bill of Rights. The Senate’s role remains delphic. Too many other important players, including Roger Sherman and Elbridge Gerry, were involved to claim that Madison’s intentions controlled everything. What should matter today, though, is not what a group of long-dead, slave-owning white men of substantial property may have been thinking about in 1789. Their world is long gone, and a good thing, too. Their evanescent intentions have little or no relevance to a contemporary world that they could not have imagined. It’s the enduring text that matters. As I’ve noted earlier, great poems aren’t beautiful because poets have willed them so. The unique beauty of great poetry is found in the text itself, in the imagery, emotions, and meaning produced by the order, cadence, structure, and content of the words. Madison and his friends, whatever they may have been thinking as summer turned into autumn in that remarkable year, transmitted a text to us that turns out to be a great poem about freedom and democracy, if only we will take the time and effort to read it closely. There is the music of poetry in