James Madison says, ‘Ambition must be made to counteract ambition:’ That’s the missing piece

Today the Supreme Court sided with President Donald J. Trump and his attempt to restrict vote-by-mail mail ballots. That bothers me. A lot.

First of all, well … there’s a little thing called the Constitution.

Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 reads, “The times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives, shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.”

The states — not the president and the supreme court — establish the rules for elections, subject to possible regulation by Congress.

Congress didn’t make this call for change — the court, packed with Trump sycophants — did.

And consider this
In Federalist Paper 51, published Feb. 8, 1778, James Madison (none other than the father of the Constitution, by the way), explained how the separation of powers between the three branches of government protect our liberty.

Madison wrote, “In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own … It is equally evident, that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal. But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

Sadly, some of our supreme court members have neither the willingness to defend the clear language of the Constitution against the president’s whims nor the gumpton to freely exercise their ambition to do their job.

Someone should tell the president and the court Americans have been voting by mail under the management of the states since the Civil War. Why, Pennsylvania initiated vote-by-mail even sooner — during the War of 1812!

I pray God may soon grant our leaders on the court and in Congress, the wisdom, the courage and the ambition to truly lead our nation and not renig on their oaths of office and their elected constitutional responsibilities to follow one man who desires to remake the entire world over in his own image.