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@WilliamHogeland Thanks for your lengthy, and still concise, and extremely well-informed analysis of James Wilson’s views over his life as a key founding leader. The view that I stated, consistent with Akhil Amar’s views in “For the People” and his paper shown below, is not who he was, but... 1/
@WilliamHogeland 2/ ...rather his narrow, specific advocacy for direct democracy in constitutional abolishing and replacing (in the period from 1787 to 1790 I meant) under the second Constitution that he coauthored as a founding leader. I said: 
@WilliamHogeland 3/ That is, that he argued for democracy. I didn’t express the view that you contradicted, namely that he was a “champion of democracy” as a person. I referenced his specific advocacy for majority rule popular sovereignty as a prime directive, as a sovereign, collective right.
@WilliamHogeland 4/ I was referring to his advocacy of the collective right of the democratic majority to abolish any constitution and replace it by procedures of direct democracy using majority rule popular sovereignty. Here is one key example to the PA Assembly:
@WilliamHogeland 5/ The distinction that Wilson is referring to *majority* voting rules in his advocacy of the sovereignty of (his phrases in the Preamble) “We the People...ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America” Amar shows here in footnote 110:
@WilliamHogeland 6/ That section is excerpted from this paper on page 31 of 53 (486):
@WilliamHogeland 7/ There is an inconsistency and a contradiction between how you describe Wilson the person over a long period of time, and what Wilson actually argued to the Pennsylvania ratifying assembly, and the review he expressed about majority rule shown in citation 110.
@WilliamHogeland 8/ He clearly argues for singular, undivided, sovereign authority for the eligible voting public that constitutes the United States of America as a nation. He doesn’t perpetuate the false view, that you opposed as well, expressed by Madison that sovereignty can be divided.
@WilliamHogeland 9/ Nor does Wilson advocate the view of Jefferson Davis, and the other seceding states decades later, opposed by Lincoln, that each state retained sovereignty and that the nation as a whole was not one sovereign People, but constituted as many Peoples as there were states.
@WilliamHogeland 10/ Rather he advocated the now-forgotten collective right that the people were over the Constitution just as the clConstitution was over the government, referring to a strict, binding hierarchy of authority as an inverted pyramid — not the pyramid of a monarchy or oligarchy.
@WilliamHogeland 11/ So this view contradicts the wholly odd and undemocratic view that the sovereign power of abolishing and replacing the Constitution was surrendered by the very Sovereign that abolished the first Constitution of 1777 and ordained and established the second one, and made...
@WilliamHogeland 12/ ...Article Five via public officials alone THE only and exclusive means of altering even a comma of the Constitution, as is the current prevalent view — the view Amar challenges vociferously in those two arguments. So whomever Wilson May have been over his lifetime, if he...
@WilliamHogeland 13/ ...he left a legal legacy that places sovereign authority — the supreme, final authority of our nation — with We the People. This establishes the Self-governance Prime Directive that makes the Preamble not only an ideal, but also an all-powerful legal procedure.
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@WilliamHogeland 14/ This procedure was expressed in the Article Seven precedent for abolishing and replacing any Constitution of the United States of America. And it gives We the People a direct way to replace the oligarchic structural result of corrupt founding in your book “Founding Finance.”
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