A written constitution’s power comes not from the words themselves but from the life breathed into it, or what Montesquieu called “the spirit of laws,” ethereal and even enchanted. James Madison warned that early state constitutions—the first was written in 1776—offered little more than “parchment barriers” to those who would seek to defy them. “The Constitution of a country is not the paper or parchment upon which the compact is written,” John Quincy Adams agreed. “It is the system of fundamental laws, by which the people have consented to be governed, which is always supposed to be impressed
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