Foremost, in the views of the Federalists, the only means through which the Constitution could maintain the partition of powers into the executive, legislative, and judiciary departments was through instructions incorporated into the structure of government. Accordingly, as Madison explains in Federalist #51, the Constitution gives each department “a will of its own” by ensuring that factors such as appointments are devoid of the other two’s influence. However, the new government gives more power to the “fountain of authority,” the citizens. By that logic, in the strictest sense, the people reserve the right to select the Head of State, legislators, and even the judges to govern them at the national level. Notably, Madison realized a problem in the given arrangement: while Presidential and Congressional elections could rely solely on the will of the people, the Judiciary required “peculiar qualifications” that not all people knew. For that reason, the selection of judges remained devoid of the citizens’ influence: that is acceptable when one considers the fact that judges boast “permanent tenure” as protection from possible manipulation by the authority selecting their persons.
The next point of focus in Madison’s Federalist #51 is the reality that in a republican government the departments cannot have an “equal power of self-defense.” Contrastingly, the legislative authority will be stronger. An illustration of the given claim is evident when one considers the truth that the legislative enacts statutes that the executive part has to execute, or risk impeachment, while the judiciary decides whether they are constitutional or not without playing a role in their formation. Madison and the rest of the Federalists found a remedy in the “[division of] the legislature into different branches” that require not only different elections but also have dissimilar “principles of action.” Meanwhile, the Federalists “fortified” the apparent weakness of the executive department by allocating it the powers to “an absolute negative on the legislature,” otherwise called the veto. Sure, Congress can enact laws, but the President reserves the authority to stop the passage of a bill. Madison concludes the given observation by asserting that if the federal government “does not perfectly correspond” with the principle of separation of its powers then the “State constitutions” will have no need to adhere to the same.
James Madison concludes his writing with an emphasis on the goals of the proposed Constitution: the Republic will protect the rights of its people, including the minority groups. After all, and in perhaps the biggest advantage of federalism, even though the federal government calls for the people to surrender all power to it, their rights receive “double security” from the division of authority into separate departments. From the national to the State levels, the dictations of the Constitution as explained in Federalist #51 guaranteed the Union’s protection against tyranny and the peoples’ rights against injustice. Such is the nature of a representative democracy that guards the people against oppressive rulers and prevents the citizens from infringing each other’s rights. On that note, Madison proposes “two methods of providing against” the evil of the minorities’ insecurity before the majority. The first one entails the construction of a “community will” that is “independent of the majority.” Madison cautions against such a move by pointing out the possibility of the majority supporting one faction of the minorities at the expense of the rest. Consequently, the second method is through the Constitution that breaks the society into “so many parts, interests, and classes of citizens” making it impossible for one group to dominate another. In that sense, authority in the Constitution-based government of the United States comes from the entire society and not just a fraction of the same. The given assertions create the grounds on which James Madison was for Federalism.
Bibliography
Madison, James. "The Federalist No. 51." Constitution Society. February 6, 1788. Accessed January 25, 2017. http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa51.htm.
