Federalist No. 32 Explained: What the States Kept

The Federalist Papers: Explained · Oct 22, 2026 · 34m

Look at a pay stub and you will find two governments taking a share of the same dollar on the same day, neither one asking the other's permission. That arrangement is not written anywhere in the Constitution. It was argued into existence in about sixteen hundred words, in a newspaper, by a man answering a rival columnist, and this episode follows how he did it. Along the way, a rule about reading that lawyers still use every day and that you already use without noticing, a hot room in Philadelphia in August of 1787 where the one exception was bargained into the document, and a bank officer in…