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Stone Ground Reality: 029 Separation of Powers — How Congress Gave It Away
The specific procedural mechanisms by which a legislature handed away decisions nobody took from it, and what a citizen can actually check.
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Stone Ground Reality: 028 Separation of Powers — Failing or Adapting
Whether the framers' entangled design is failing or operating under conditions it was never built for, and where the reward for defending an institution went.
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Stone Ground Reality: 027 Separation of Powers — Ambition Checking Ambition
The framers' entangled design, the institutional loyalty it assumed, and why a machine built for jealous officeholders behaves differently when loyalty runs to party instead.
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Stone Ground Reality: 026 The Bill of Rights — The Two Nobody Quotes
The Ninth and Tenth Amendments — why they were written, why one has almost never carried independent force and the other has been read as both a truism and a live limit, and what it means for text to sit in the founding charter for two centuries without operating.
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Stone Ground Reality: 025 The Bill of Rights — What Rights Are For
Whether the first ten amendments are limits on what government may do or guarantees that require government to act — argued through speech, religion, arms, criminal procedure, and search and seizure, and left unresolved.
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Stone Ground Reality: 024 The Bill of Rights — What the First Congress Did
How the first ten amendments were actually made — Madison's long slate of June 1789, what the House kept, what the Senate cut, the deleted provision that would have bound the states, and the two articles that did not make it in 1791.
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Stone Ground Reality: 023 The Bill of Rights — The Price of Ratification
The amendments that were the price of ratification — why the framers left them out, what the ratifying conventions extracted, and the long stretch during which the first ten restrained the federal government and almost nothing else.
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Stone Ground Reality: 022 Reality Check: Ratification — Whose Consent Was It
Listener calls on the founding sequence — whether the settlement at Philadelphia was legitimate, whose consent it rested on, and what binds a generation that never signed it.
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Stone Ground Reality: 021 The Anti-Federalist Rebuttal — The Argument That Never Ended
The people who read the proposed Constitution and said no — what they predicted, how much of it came true, and why the losing side of the ratification argument produced the Bill of Rights.
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Stone Ground Reality: 020 The Anti-Federalist Rebuttal — Why They Lost and What They Won
The people who read the proposed Constitution and said no — what they predicted, how much of it came true, and why the losing side of the ratification argument produced the Bill of Rights.
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Stone Ground Reality: 019 The Anti-Federalist Rebuttal — What They Saw
The people who read the proposed Constitution and said no — what they predicted, how much of it came true, and why the losing side of the ratification argument produced the Bill of Rights.
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Stone Ground Reality: 018 The Federalist Case — How Advocacy Became Authority
The Federalist Papers read as what they were — ratification advocacy written under deadline by three men with a document to sell — and the question of how a partisan sales campaign became the authoritative guide to what the founding charter means. This final installment examines how campaign...