Madison's Music Read Online Free PDF

cross-endorse major party candidates, allowing the supporters of a minor party to play a role in selecting the winner of an election while expressing support for the minor party’s ideological position.
    The robust third-party culture of the nineteenth century rested on ease of ballot access and the ability to cross-endorse. The Supreme Court has wiped out both, leaving a Republicrat cartel that stifles new ideas that might threaten the status quo. A Supreme Court willing and able to hear Madison’s democratic music would use it to break the cartel, not reinforce it.
    THE MODERN PETITION CLAUSE: ON SETTING DEMOCRATIC AGENDAS
    The Supreme Court has virtually erased the Petition for a Redress of Grievances Clause from the modern First Amendment, insisting that it does no work that is not already done by an imperial Free Speech Clause that has simply swallowed the rest of the First Amendment. 8 The emergence of an imperial Free Speech Clausethat purports to supplant the separate clauses protecting free exercise, free press, freedom of assembly, and the right to petition is a classic example of how failure to hear Madison’s music distorts First Amendment jurisprudence. If the seven truncated words of the Free Speech Clause do all the heavy lifting in all those areas, why did Madison bother with redundant press, assembly, and petition clauses?
    In fact, each clause protects an essential phase of Madison’s democratic narrative. The religion clauses protect the interior spaces of the mind, where an idea develops. Free speech protects its articulation; a free press, its mass dissemination. Freedom of association nurtures the idea’s growth into a political movement, where free assembly takes over, protecting its mass mobilization. The Petition Clause concludes Madison’s narrative, protecting the idea’s introduction into the formal democratic lawmaking process, forcing the legislature to place the issue on its agenda.
    The legislative agenda-setting function of the Petition Clause is a watered-down version of an even stronger idea considered and rejected by the Founders that would have permitted constituents to “instruct” legislators to take certain action. That was too much for Madison and his friends in the summer of 1789, but not before a full-dress debate considered and rejected the idea of “instruction.” 9 Instead, drawing on British parliamentary history, the Founders compromised on a “petition” mechanism to ensure that the legislature would be confronted by issues of great concern to constituents.
    Viewed as the culmination of Madison’s democratic narrative, the Petition Clause plays a crucial structural role, linking a vigorous private democratic culture protected by speech, press, association, and assembly to the formal processes of democratic lawmaking. Unlike the stronger idea of instruction, petition does not require legislators to vote one way or another. But properly understood, the Petition Clause does require the democratic legislature at least to consider issues of great importance to constituents. Although the Petition Clause has fallen on hard times these days, it played a major role in debates over slavery in the pre–Civil Warperiod. Beginning in 1831, Northern abolitionists adopted a British strategy and flooded Congress with petitions seeking legislative action limiting or abolishing slavery. In Britain, the petition process triggered an 1833 vote in the House of Commons abolishing slavery in most of the British Empire. In the United States, however, Congress was dominated by pro-slavery members, who used a series of blocking techniques—“gag rules”—to keep antislavery petitions from being read on the floor of the House. When John Quincy Adams, after serving as our sixth president from 1825 to 1829, was elected to the House in 1830, he became a champion of the petition process, almost starting a riot when he attempted to