National & Minnesota Report
Using the 2026 midterm elections as a backdrop, we believe the moment warrants a revisitation of the United States Constitution. We take this backward glance with one of the Founding Fathers who authored the Declaration of Independence and who also impacted the creation of the Bill of Rights from afar as the American Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson.
We note the critics of Jefferson fully. We note his personal dichotomy in calling for all men to be created equal while he owned around 200 enslaved people at the time of writing the Declaration, as well as the exclusion of recognition of women as essential in the formation of this nation. We discuss that history further in our sources on Jefferson and slavery from Monticello: https://www.monticello.org/slavery/
With these hypocrisies fully noted, we believe there are structural concepts Jefferson offered which remain in place today, and which are valuable considerations to our nation going forward.
The first we point out is the distinctive differences between Urban and Rural America, which today also warrants an incorporation of Suburban America as an additional aspect and in fact the weight of the populations of each in the structure of representation and creation of Congressional and Legislative Districts.
In his calls for Independence, Jefferson advances his position for America to remain a nation of small, independent farmers. We believe this is not because he disliked cities, but because he thought political character came from economic life and the Agrarian economy was an essential element of the colonial period and is evident in what it offers to a colonialist.
A farmer who has the luxury of land, here on the American Continent, has a valuable opportunity that was not available in Europe. He owns his own land, grows his own food, and owes no boss or creditor. He is, in Jefferson‘s view, naturally vigorous, independent, and invested in liberty. Whereas a waged worker, merchant, or factory worker is completely dependent on others and, in turn, is more easily corrupted or controlled by external factors such as government.
He laid this out most famously in Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIX in 1785:
“Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever he had a chosen people, whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue.”
And in the same period, in a letter to John Jay, August 23, 1785, he expanded it:
“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens. They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most virtuous, and they are tied to their country and wedded to its liberty and interests by the most lasting bonds.” He continued, “As long therefore as they can find employment in this line, I would not convert them into mariners, artisans, or anything else.”
This was also a reflection of his direct opposition to Alexander Hamilton. Hamilton wanted a commercial, manufacturing, financial America centered in cities with a strong central government and national bank. Jefferson wanted what scholars now call an Agrarian Democracy: a decentralized republic of yeoman farmers, with power kept close to the people, government kept weak, and land kept cheap and widely distributed.
He did not win that argument in practice, and in fact, as President he bought Louisiana and embraced expansion partly to keep the agrarian vision alive, but the ideal became the ideology of the Democratic-Republican Party and later populism.
Additionally, he effectively called for a Living, Breathing Constitution. Although he never used that phrase directly, he argued explicitly that no generation has the right to bind the next with permanent law.
His classic statement is the letter to James Madison from Paris, September 6, 1789, written as the French Revolution was unfolding:
“I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it.”
“On similar ground it may be proved that no society can make a perpetual constitution, or even a perpetual law. The earth belongs always to the living generation.” He then draws the radical conclusion:
“Every constitution then, & every law, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be enforced longer, it is an act of force, & not of right.” We find the timing component interesting because in our modern day this is a generation, and back then Jefferson calculated 19 years as a generation based on mortality tables. The idea was that debts, laws, and constitutions should expire unless the living explicitly renew them. We link the full letter here from the National Archives: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-12-02-0248
His most apt statement on the matter occurred in his letter to Samuel Kercheval, July 12, 1816, where he wrote, “Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched. They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human, and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment… Let us provide in our constitution for its revision…”
So, for Jefferson, the two ideas fit together: an agrarian republic creates independent citizens capable of self-rule, and a living constitution ensures those citizens are never ruled permanently by the dead hand of the past.
When viewing the proposed United States Constitution from the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and writing his thoughts in letters back to the states, he was still influential. It is noteworthy that James Madison sent Jefferson a copy in October 1787. Jefferson replied on December 20, 1787, from Paris, with a careful list.
What he liked: the separation of powers, the House of Representatives, checks on the legislature, the compromise on representation.
What he did not like, and this is where he mattered:
- The omission of a Bill of Rights
- No limit on presidential re-election; he feared a president-for-life
On the first point, his language became famous:
“Let me add that a bill of rights is what the people are entitled to against every government on earth, general or particular, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.” — Jefferson to Madison, December 20, 1787
In that same letter he listed what it should contain:
“First the omission of a bill of rights providing clearly & without the aid of sophisms for freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, the eternal & unremitting force of the habeas corpus laws, and trials by jury in all matters of fact triable by the laws of the land…”
In other words: freedom of religion, freedom of the press, protection against standing armies, restriction against monopolies, habeas corpus, and jury trials.
It is believed Madison at first thought a Bill of Rights was unnecessary and even dangerous, unnecessary because the federal government only had enumerated powers, dangerous because listing some rights might imply others were not protected.
This resulted in Jefferson continuing to press him in 1787-1789, in a back-and-forth that historians call the Madison-Jefferson letters on the Bill of Rights. Madison wrote Jefferson on October 17, 1788, laying out his doubts. Jefferson replied on March 15, 1789, arguing that a bill of rights would check the majority, educate the public, and give judges a clear text to enforce.
In the end, it worked. Madison reversed himself and, as a member of the First Congress, introduced the amendments himself on June 8, 1789:
“On June 8, 1789, James Madison introduced his proposed amendments to the Constitution, which would eventually become known as the Bill of Rights.” Twelve were proposed by Congress on September 25, 1789. Ten were ratified on December 15, 1791.
Now the National Archives summarizes Jefferson‘s impact in this way:
“Although absent from the Constitutional Convention and during the period of ratification, Jefferson rendered no inconsiderable service to the cause of Constitutional Government, for it was partly through his insistence that the Bill of Rights…”
As an additional value to his own letters, he also sent Madison crates of books on government, history, and political theory from Paris while Madison was preparing for the Convention, thus helping shape Madison‘s thinking about republics, factions, and checks.
Now, we here at Checks & Balances do not endorse a wholesale throwing out of the United States Constitution on a 20-year cycle, nor do we endorse the call for a Constitutional Convention, largely because certain aspects might be dramatically changed; for instance, there may not be the same support for the Bill of Rights. Additionally, because we have had 33 proposed Amendments to the document, 10 labeled as the Bill of Rights and 27 ratified overall, with the last one occurring in 1992, the process for change is intentionally slow and deliberative. We link the full list here: https://www.archives.gov/founding-fathers/constitution
In the subsequent articles, we will outline some of the changes in the system we would like to see implemented, with a full acknowledgement of Donald J. Trump being a structural impediment to any Prescription for Change, but this is because many of our proposed changes are in direct result of his time in office. One additional note: these proposed changes are also in direct rebuttal to Stephen Miller‘s Project 2025 initiative.