Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Richard Labunski" in English language version.
Which brings me to the best book of them all — and the only one of the four worth remembering — and that is Labunski's unheralded "James Madison and the Struggle for the Bill of Rights" (Oxford 2006). The University of Kentucky journalism professor offers in mind-numbing detail Madison's efforts first to prevent a bill of rights from being incorporated into the text of the Constitution, and then his real politic realization that the Constitution itself only would be accepted by his fellow Founders if in the end it did include a bill of particularized rights and freedoms. To absorb the Madison book is to understand that the Constitution is neither the Ark of the Covenant (as Thomas Jefferson once famously said) nor a mere legal guidepost along the American way that ought to be dispensed with in difficult times.
It is instead, as Labunski laboriously points out, a document conceived and drafted by rich white men during the political moment of their lives; a document brilliant mostly for its ambiguities and its ability (thanks to generations of judges as polished and as responsible for our rule of law as any of Madison's gang) to foresee the potential, indeed, the destiny, of a changed and changing world.
"We need some constitutional amendments rather urgently that could not be enacted any other way," said Richard Labunski, a University of Kentucky scholar and the author of "The Second Constitutional Convention: How the American People Can Take Back Their Government." "We need to give challengers a better chance of unseating incumbents, and it simply will not happen that Congress would vote to limit its own powers," he argued.
