-- Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, friends and fellow statesman, had radically different views about constitutionalism. While Madison worried that public tampering would after the security of rights, Jefferson recommended subjecting constitutions and their embedded principles to regular popular scrutiny. In the post-founding generation, a period when the people first considered themselves part of a democratic republic, Americans joined together to rewrite their state constitutions, documents whose purpose was in the Jeffersonian manner, to empower the people.

Through careful analysis of...