As the United States prepares to celebrate 250 years of its Independence, it is proper to examine the career of James Madison, the fourth president of the Republic. More than any other, he shaped the Constitution in the 1780’s. Both as a politician and as president, he worried about the “fell spirit of factious opposition.” He borrowed copiously from the scholars of the Roman Republic. Cicero, Polybius, and other worthies were invoked to illustrate the fragility of representative government.

Certainly, Madison had much to be concerned about. He witnessed in 1798 the efforts by Federalists to impose the Alien and Sedition Acts, which threatened immigrants who were deemed disagreeable and threatened to imprison dissenters, particularly newspaper publishers. Nowadays, he would be disappointed but not surprised by Donald Trump’s attempt to impose his will by any means necessary. Even the ancients anticipated all the overreach of government. A Roman poet, Juvenal, anticipated this style in the second century AD when he announced, “Give them bread and circuses, and they will never revolt”

Of course, when Juvenal wrote these words, Rome was fully in Empire Mode. Nothing Trump has done from the fight on the White House lawn to his “rallies” to celebrate his reign would appear to the poet to be out of the ordinary. Madison and his generation feared such imperial urges from the beginning. But none of this began with the Donald.

Where Madison differed from many of his predecessors was that he believed the Constitution to be the standard for government. He was very adamant on this point: in 1817, he vetoed a bill allowing the federal government to undertake a comprehensive effort in internal improvements, roads, canals, and harbors. The irony was that he thought the bill beneficial, but because the Constitution made no allowance for it, he vetoed the legislation on his last day in office.

Which gets at the nub of the problem. The notion that there “ought to be a law” gradually expanded the power of the federal government. Madison and others, such as John Randolph of Roanoke, feared that doing the right thing at the expense of the document forged in Philadelphia between 1787 and 1789 would tempt the political furies. Those denizens of the general welfare clause threatened the awkward pact between North and South. In many respects, the Constitution is not a happy document but a pact between powerful interests.

In this respect, it resembles the Roman Republic with its patricians and plebeians. By the time Julius Caesar and Augustus Caesar began the road to Empire, Republican Rome was a fiction run by oligarchs, corrupt Senators, and greedy, ambitious wannabes, all of whom sought “freedom” as they envisioned it with scant regard for their rivals. Madison’s notion is that to preserve liberty, everyone must give something up. Neither party, the Democratic nor the Republican, lives up to that lofty standard. The emergence of the Executive Order as the primary tool to advance an agenda has further weakened the body politic. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which granted emergency powers to the president, weakened the Republic and is being imitated by our executive branch.

Both sides have equal claim to being displeased at the imperial tendencies of their opponents. Supreme Court rulings such as Roe vs Wade or the Dobbs Decision relied not on Congressional action but judicial fiat. Gay marriage was the byproduct of a Supreme Court decision, minus Congress. As salutary as many of these acts are, they tend to be contentious. Although Madisonian precepts may be dated, they were designed to serve as barriers to winner-take-all government. The tide of fearful faction must be resisted if for no other reason but to keep the peace and to restrain overweening executive power.