If it’s a bad idea to take up the constitutional editing pen whenever problems are alleged to arise in the separation of powers, how about institutionalizing such a process, creating a regular cycle of constitutional revision opportunities that come around like clockwork on the calendar? Could such a recourse to the most basic exercise of sovereignty be rendered more safe by being more frequent and familiar, rather than occasional and crisis-driven?

Madison takes up this idea in Federalist No. 50, rejecting it on several grounds. One is that the timing of the intervals between visits to the constitutional wellspring could defeat their purpose. If a breach of the constitution is very recent, many of the same passions that prompted it could still be excited, and what would be the chance of correcting the problem? If several years pass before the next regular corrective opportunity, it may arrive too late to do much good, and “a distant prospect of public censure would be a very feeble restraint” on the temptations of power in the meantime, if much was to be gained by the violation in the short term.

This whole discussion may look very odd to us today, seeming to venture almost pointlessly into speculative territory about an idea that we find hard to credit now. But as Madison writes, “[t]he scheme of revising the constitution in order to correct recent breaches of it, as well as for other purposes, has been actually tried in one of the states.” That state is Pennsylvania, which under its short-lived 1776 constitution (replaced with a new and better one in 1790) had experimented with an odd institution called the “council of censors,” an elected body charged with meeting every seven years to deliberate on constitutional questions. The council’s powers were largely hortatory rather than practical; its members (when it met in 1783-84) overlapped heavily with that of the institutions whose actions it was charged with examining; its competence in addressing constitutional questions was doubtful; and like the government itself and the community at large, the council “was split into two fixed and violent parties.”

Chalk up another failed experiment in constitutional republicanism. What now?

(For explanation of this recurring feature, see here.)