James Madison, the Virginia delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, served as a member of the Confederation Congress and later became the fourth President of the United States. Madison’s contribution to the constitutional structure of America was immense, leading to him being regarded as the father of the American constitution. During the early years, the founding fathers grappled with the establishment of a federalist state that could accommodate more than one sovereign center. According to LaCroix (as cited in LaCroix, 2011), political mandarins of the time were dissatisfied with the unitarily parliament-based sovereignty and were averse to “any constitutional system that appeared to create an imperium in imperio, or a sovereign within a sovereign” (41). Therefore, the American founders became increasingly concerned with establishing an acceptable form of federal supremacy and anchoring it within the constitutional order. …show more content…
He felt that these confederacies were blighted with a lack of accountability of members to a central authority, which inescapably made them weak (Pilon, 2002). At the convention and other fora, Madison suggested that the only way out was to grant the government veto power, commonly known as a negative, over state legislation. To Madison, this negative was to be bestowed on Congress or the Senate to confer power of federal authority to regulate states’ legislation processes (LaCroix, 2011). Madison’s constitutional view was that Congress should have the final say on matters of state legislations. However, the suggestions on the supervisory authority of Congress were rejected by the delegates; they instead adopted the federal supremacy based on judicial