Month: July 2026

The parades, reenactments and fireworks are over. And in the aftermath of Americans’ celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is important to recognize that the declaration was only the first step in making a unified country.

Many of the founders argued that the country needed a remodeled government. They asked whether it was possible to design a government for the new country that ensured liberty in the face of the inherent flaws of human nature.

Revolution’s aftermath

In the aftermath of the American Revolutionary War, the national government remained a loose confederation of state governments. While effective in winning the war, the new government faced social and political fissures in the postwar period.

The war left the new republic with extensive debts shared unevenly between the states. Common farmers, including many Revolutionary War veterans, rebelled in opposition to postwar taxation policies. Rather than a cohesive national unit, Americans faced a loose, tense and combative set of state and local interests.

The Second Continental Congress in 1777 produced the first constitution of the United States, the Articles of Confederation. However, differing interests between state governments, including the management of western territory and public finance, slowed ratification. Only in 1781, as the Revolutionary War was entering its final stage, did all of the states finally agree to ratify the articles.

Both the terms of ratification and the text of the Articles of Confederation reflected a suspicion between the state governments, each of which wanted to protect their own local interests rather than cede authority to the national government.

Lumbering system

The limited powers that the articles granted to the national government reflected the lack of consensus between states. The government designed in the articles lacked any strong executive authority and did not have a national judiciary.

Additionally, the national legislature, which the articles referred to as a “league of friendship,” functioned less like a representative organ of the people at large than a council of state governments.

The articles created a single-chamber Congress in which each state cast one vote. Major legislation required a supermajority, and amendments required unanimity.

To many, such a slow-moving, restrictive system was preferable, particularly with the memory of the abuses of the British government still in recent memory.

However, the 1780s saw a series of contentious events – a barely thwarted uprising of frustrated soldiers called the Newburgh Conspiracy, interstate trade disputes, an economic depression and a rural tax rebellion that prompted many American leaders to reconceptualize the role and structure of American government around a more unified, national and interventionist model.

Competing visions

The nationalists were members of the Constitutional Convention that met in Philadelphia in the Summer of 1787 to draft the successor to the articles, the United States Constitution. This group included Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay. These three men sought to convey that the proper role of government is to protect people from themselves.

The nationalists believed in a more centralized national union that balanced competing interests in the new republic. They sought to eliminate friction between the states by eliminating interstate trade barriers, consolidating state debts and creating a stronger central administrative body under a strong executive.

Furthermore, they sought to create a balance of power by creating a three-part federal government consisting of a two-chamber legislature, an executive branch and a national judiciary. Each would have expanded powers.

In contrast to the articles, the proposed Constitution included uniform national commercial regulation, monetary controls such as the exclusive right of the national government to issue legal tender, augmented executive powers to determine foreign policy and an overarching federal court structure. It also included an explicit national power to suppress uprisings.

The representatives to the convention, which also included prominent figures such as George Washington and Benjamin Franklin, considered the federal government’s ability to deal with uprisings and fiscal policy to be particularly important. It was also topical: A tax imposed on cash-poor farmers to pay down the public war debt had just prompted a rebellion in western Massachusetts led by Revolutionary veteran Daniel Shays.

Many rebels believed the burden of repaying the public debt fell disproportionately on common people while benefiting elites. Nationalist political theorists such as Hamilton, Madison and Jay saw such revolts against national authority as the product of demagogues instigating unrestrained urges into social movements they referred to as “factions.”

Initially, the terms of the new Constitution received substantial opposition from prominent political writers later known as the Anti-Federalists. These often anonymous authors began publishing criticisms of the yet unratified Constitution as an unwarranted accumulation of federal power that would endanger the hard-won liberties secured by the Revolutionary War.

This is where the document that has become known as the Federalist Papers comes in.

‘If men were angels …’

Hamilton, Madison and Jay responded to these criticisms as a group. Adopting the pen name Publius, they published 85 essays in New York newspapers supporting ratification. In defense of the Constitution’s proposal to increase the powers of the proposed national government, these authors turned to some of the most basic philosophical questions about humanity.

Each argued that the inherent flaws of human nature necessitated a strong government to check political abuse, self-interest and even violence that they saw as inherent in the fabric of human society. They rallied around the position reflected in Madison’s famous statement in the essay known as Federalist 51 that “if men were angels, no government would be necessary.”

The Federalist Papers include proposals for institutional solutions that sought to redirect the destructive drives of individuals toward positive social ends. To the authors, a new constitutional government that controlled both the impulses of the masses and the abuses of their leaders would serve as the means through which the new United States government could accomplish this task.

Each saw human nature as susceptible to corruption by base impulses and self-interest.

In Federalist 10, Madison argued that faction is “sown in the nature of man.”

Similarly, in Federalist 6, Hamilton rejected the commonly held idea that republics were automatically peaceful. Instead, he argued, political leaders and states were driven by ambitions and jealousies, which he saw as a characteristic shortcoming of the government under the Articles of Confederation as well as a law of nature governing relations between nations.

Hamilton wrote that if the states remained disunited, then “the subdivisions into which they might be thrown would have frequent and violent contests with each other.” To argue otherwise, he wrote, would be “to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.”

Consequently, as Hamilton asserted in Federalist 15, governments must have effective coercive authority to enforce laws because they cannot rely solely on the goodwill and civic virtue of their citizens: “If there be no penalty annexed to disobedience, the resolutions or commands which pretend to be laws will, in fact, amount to nothing more than advice or recommendation.”

Ultimately, the defense of the Constitution provided by the Federalist Papers sought to frame the new government in terms of a skeptical view of humanity that recognized what Madison called “a degree of depravity in mankind.”

They also asserted that constitutional design and balanced government could control these dangerous impulses. As Madison added, “There are other qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”

Donovan Fifield receives funding from the European Research Council.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation

The artificial intelligence boom in the United States is being matched by a data center building boom. There are more than 3,000 data centers in the U.S. and another 1,500 in development, according to a Pew Research Center analysis.

While President Donald Trump has promoted AI advancement, calling it crucial to economic and national security, polling shows that 7 in 10 Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their communities, citing higher utility bills, pollution, noise and the loss of green space. These centers, which hold computer servers that process words, images and lines of code for large language models such as ChatGPT, also use high amounts of water and electricity.

There is growing opposition to the infrastructure surrounding them, too, particularly the transmission lines needed to power them, which often must cross land belonging to private citizens.

Where private citizens refuse to sell their land, companies are turning to eminent domain, the government’s inherent power to seize private property without a landowner’s consent. But does a line built to serve a private data center qualify?

I’m a legal scholar who studies eminent domain issues, and I interpret today’s disputes over seizure of property for the benefit of AI infrastructure as the latest incarnation of a long-standing debate about the limits of taking private property for public use.

Why is expansion needed?

Data centers have massive power needs that can stress electrical grids and threaten their reliability. In 2024 they accounted for more than 4% of the nation’s total electricity use. Demand will grow as more are built. To meet this demand, power companies must build more transmission lines – and acquire land to put them on.

Across the U.S. – in states such as Georgia and Pennsylvania – power companies have looked to eminent domain to facilitate these goals.

What is eminent domain?

Power companies can approach landowners to purchase easements for transmission lines; if landowners refuse, the government might force a sale.

The government may take private land without consent if the seizure is for “public use” and if the landowner is given “just compensation,” according to the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

While the federal government has the power to initiate eminent domain actions – also called condemnations – most are done by state and local governments.

Governments can also delegate this power to private entities or “common carriers,” such as power and water companies, though every state has its own rules for whether and how these utilities can exercise eminent domain. In Texas, for example, the state Supreme Court has held that a project must “serve the public” and “cannot be built only for the builder’s exclusive use” in order to qualify as a common carrier.

What is the ‘public use’ standard?

While property may be taken only for “public use,” the U.S. Supreme Court has interpreted that requirement permissively. In its 2005 Kelo v. City of New London decision, the court held that economic development qualified, allowing New London, Connecticut, to seize homes for private development around a Pfizer facility. That redevelopment, however, never happened, and Pfizer eventually left New London.

In response to that decision – and the public backlash that followed – 45 states enacted eminent domain reform laws.

In addition to reform laws, some state supreme courts interpret the eminent domain provisions of their own state constitutions more restrictively. The supreme courts of Michigan, Ohio and Oklahoma have all prohibited seizing private property to give it to another private party purely for economic development.

This means private landowners may have more success challenging condemnation actions under their state constitutions than in federal court. Still, courts typically permit exercise of eminent domain by utilities such as power companies.

What does this mean for data center expansion?

Suits challenging the seizure of property for transmission lines on the grounds of public use have mixed results.

For example, the supreme courts of South Dakota and Vermont have each affirmed seizures by power companies, determining that providing at least some energy and improved power grid reliability to in-state customers were valid public uses.

But this argument changes if transmission lines, some of which cross state lines, don’t benefit anyone in the state.

In 1984, for example, the Mississippi Supreme Court rejected a power company’s condemnation action because the transmission line in question would have run from Mississippi into Louisiana without benefiting any Mississippi customers.

These decisions suggest that as data centers increase energy demand and stress current infrastructure, seizing land to improve power grid reliability will likely qualify as public use, especially if the intention is to secure reliability for in-state customers.

Still, arguments around whether additional transmission lines actually serve in-state customers may give landowners grounds for a challenge.

Aaron Walayat does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

​Politics + Society – The Conversation