BAD ENOUGH THE rIGHT ISN'T rEPUBLICAN....:

The Founders knew this history well. They wanted a constitution that could weather the storms of faction, jealousy, and lust for power. As James Madison put the matter in The Federalist Papers (1787-88), the Americans sought "a republican remedy for the diseases most incident to republican government."

And they seized upon Cicero. In his influential Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States (1787), which circulated at the Constitutional Convention, Adams traced the development of the balanced constitution from Aristotle to Cicero, his hero. "As all the ages of the world have not produced a greater statesman and philosopher united in the same character," Adams wrote, "his authority should have great weight."

The Founders also turned to thinkers such as the French philosopher Montesquieu (1689-1755), author of The Spirit of Laws, one of the great works in the history of political thought. Montesquieu famously developed a theory of the separation of powers: legislative, executive, and judicial. "When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates," he wrote, "there can be no liberty." Yet, in this, Montesquieu acknowledged his own intellectual debt to Cicero and Rome's example. [...]

Cicero wrote with great insight about the concepts of justice, education, morals, and the character of the ideal statesman. But perhaps his most important contribution to the American political order was his understanding of natural law.

Cicero believed that a rational Providence oversaw the world, a world embedded in divine law: a set of moral and religious truths that govern the human condition. These truths were etched into the mind and conscience of every human being. "The nature of law must be sought in the nature of man," he wrote in The Laws. "Man is a single species which has a share in divine reason and is bound together by a partnership in justice."

As Cicero explained it, a political commitment to justice was only possible because of the universal and unchangeable character of natural law. It alone provided "the bond which holds together a community of citizens." His description of natural law would be embraced by thinkers ranging from Thomas Aquinas to John Locke to Thomas Jefferson:

We cannot be exempted from this law by any decree of the Senate or the people; nor do we need anyone else to expound or explain it. There will not be one such law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another in the future, but all peoples at all times will be embraced by a single and eternal and unchangeable law; and there will be, as it were, one lord and master of us all--the god who is the author, proposer and interpreter of that law. Whoever refuses to obey it will be turning his back on himself. Because he has denied his nature as a human being he will face the gravest penalties for this alone.

All of the Founders subscribed to some version of natural law; it seemed to confirm the teachings of Christianity, held in high regard in the Protestant culture of colonial America. Thus, most of the Founders had Cicero in mind when they made natural law part of their political discourse. "Although the Founders had access to every level of Western discourse on natural law," writes historian Carl J. Richard, "they cited Cicero in support of the theory even more than in support of mixed government."

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