I am posting the response that I received from Professor Bilder to the five questions that I posed on Sunday:
My thanks for the response to the short piece in the Globe's Ideas section. I am reminded of Edmund Randolph's caution to James Madison in 1789 that he feared he would "mingle inadvertently much of what I have heard since, without being able to separate it from what occurred then." I have been interested in a different vantage point. I suppose, in certain respects, it is somewhat analogous to the question Madison wrote Archibald Stuart in a slightly different context in October 1787: "That unanimity is not to be expected in any great political question: that the danger is probably exaggerated on each side, when an opposite danger is conceived on the opposite side—that if any Constitution is to be established by deliberation & choice, it must be examined with many allowances, and must be compared not with the theory, which each individual may frame in his own mind, but with the system which it is meant to take the place of, and with any other which there might be a probability of obtaining." A similar sentiment appears in Federalist 37, my personal favorite of Madison's writings in the Federalist Papers. Thanks to all.
Although I had hoped for a more direct response, I am grateful to Professor Bilder for her acknowledgement of the questions.
