You can look at founding father Alexander Hamilton nevertheless assuring - assuring - the countrymen in Federalist 78 that the role of the federal courts under the proposed Constitution would be limited.
I'm a federalist. I believe in the Italy of municipalities, of the Renaissance, not in Mussolini's centralization.
I was told that Federalist Society conventions were intellectually serious, courteous, and open to various points of view, and that has certainly been my experience.
The die is cast in Canada: there are two ethnic and linguistic groups; each is too strong and too deeply rooted in the past, too firmly bound to a mother culture, to be able to swamp the other. But if the two will collaborate inside of a truly pluralist state, Canada could become a privileged place where the federalist form of government, which is the government of tomorrow's world, will be perfected.
Pope John Paul II himself was kind of a rather independent, creative man. I remember being told by somebody who worked very close with him in preparation for his first visit to the United States in 1979, he studied our normative documents, Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, the Constitution. And he was amazed. He called his priests first thing in the morning and he said, he said, I thought America was a pagan country.
. . . We are all Federalists,and we are all Republicans.
If I could not go to heaven with but a party, I would not go there at all. Therefore, I am not of the party of federalists. But I am much further from that of the anti-federalists.
Jose Vasconcelos, Mexico's great federalist and apologist, has coined a wonderful term, la raza cósmica, "the cosmic race," a new people having not one race but many in their blood.
In Madison's famous formulation in the Federalist, constitutional restrictions on government assume that we "first enable the government to control the governed. " If the public authorities can be outgunned or bribed, the vibrancy of the private sector can be pathological.
The purpose of the Federalist Society was to bring together young people who had this skepticism about what they were being taught and to let them know that there were others who shared this skepticism.
