This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, June 4th, 2014. I'm Caleb Brown.

The American people are free not because of the Constitution, but in spite of it. That is the broad claim of

F. H. Buckley in his new book, The Once and Future King, The Rise of Crown Government

in America. We spoke prior to a forum for the book held last week.

Your argument is such a stridently different one from popular perception about the Constitution of the United States, how we got it, what was, what went

into it, what the sort of energy was that animated the document that we ended up with and so I think that begs that you sort of unpack a lot of this.

Let's start with your assessment of the Federalist Papers, the

ratification, the sort of debate over the structure of the Constitution at the time, back in the late 1700s.

I'm not making a brief for originalism here.

I don't want to say to interpret the Constitution,

you have to go back to what the framers thought,

but come to think of it, that's not a bad way of doing it

now if you were to do that what you do is you'd read the notes of the convention

principally Madison's notes but other people's. And there you'd find that the theme of the

Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 was somewhat different from what appears in

the Federalist Papers. Recall in the Federalist Papers.

Recall that the Federalist Papers were written by two people who emerged quite dissatisfied with

the result.

Madison thought he had lost essentially.

Hamilton was so much at the extreme

that he departed halfway through.

He knew he had no influence with the delegates.

...