Paraphrases

Federalist No. 54 - Determining How Many Representatives Each State Gets     paraphrased into modern English by James Madison, February 12, 1788. To: the People of the State of New York: The next aspect of the House of Representatives I'll discuss will be how many are appointed in the different States -- it will be determined in the same way that direct taxes are determined [ by population ]. Many people recommend that the number of people in each State should determine how many representatives the States will have. Using that same guideline to set taxes will likely be just as well accepted, although the rule itself is founded on a different principle. With Representatives, the guideline refers to the rights of the people to be represented. That's a natural and general connection. But with taxes, it has to do with the amount of wealth. That's not a precise measure, and not generally the most suitable. But even though applying that guideline to the relative wealth and contri...

Federalist No. 48 - The Branches Shouldn't Be So Separate That They Have No Control Over Each Other     paraphrased into modern English by James Madison, February 1, 1788 To: the People of the State of New York: In the last Federalist Paper, we showed that the political truism we discussed [ about the three branches staying separate from each other ] doesn't require that the legislative, executive, and judiciary branches should be kept completely isolated from each other. Now I'll show that these branches need to be connected and blended enough to give each of the branches enough constitutional control over each other to ensure that there's the kind of separation that the truism requires to maintain a free government in practice. Everyone agrees that any authority that belongs to one of the branches should not be directly and completely carried out by either of the other branches. Power has a tendency to encroach, so it should be effectively restrained and not allowed t...