Your Blue Slip is Showing
The Blue Slip: Last Bastion or Final Betrayal of the Framers’ Senate? A Follow-Up to “Restore the Republican Soul of the Senate” In the sweltering summer of 1787, as the delegates to the Constitutional Convention debated the bones of the new republic in Philadelphia, one institution emerged as the deliberate brake on the wheels of government: the Senate. It was not born of compromise alone but of a profound suspicion of unchecked majorities. James Madison, scribbling notes in the margins of his copy of Montesquieu, envisioned an upper house that would "refine and enlarge the public views" while tethering them to…