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adverted to on a former occasion. It is, that in a democracy, the people meet and exercise the government in person; in a republic, they assemble and administer it by their representatives and agents”); The Federalist No. 39 (James Madison), 233–34 (“[W]e may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the great body of the people, and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for a limited period, or during good behavior. It is essential to such a government that it be derived from the great body of the society, not from an inconsiderable proportion, or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might aspire to the rank of republicans, and claim for their government the honorable title of republic. It is sufficient for such a government that the persons administering it be appointed, either directly or indirectly, by the people; and that they hold their appointments by either of the tenures just specified”) (emphasis in the original).

4. Zephyr Teachout, “The Anti-Corruption Principle,” Cornell Law Review (2008), 341, 377. Here and throughout I have drawn heavily upon Professor Teachout’s original framing of this issue. Her work made clearer the sense in which the current Congress was a “corruption” of the framing design. Teachout has extended her analysis in a forthcoming book, Benjamin Franklin’s Snuff Box (forthcoming, 2012).

5. See, e.g., Gordon S. Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (Oxford University Press, 2009), 429 (“For some American leaders, however, the ink on the Declaration of Independence was scarcely dry before they began expressing doubts about the possibility of realizing the high hopes and dreams of the Revolution); Kurt T. Lash, “Rejecting Conventional Wisdom: Federalist Ambivalence in the Framing and Implementation of Article V,” American Journal of Legal History 38 (1994): 197, 225 (“In the decade following the Revolution, the track record of the state legislatures provided less reason to see society in terms of majorities acting for the common good and more reason to see competing factional interests that had to be controlled through institutional safeguards”).

6. See Dennis Thompson, “Two Concepts of Corruption,” George Washington Law Review 73 (2005): 1036, 1038. (“The democratic process is the modern surrogate for the consensus on the public good that traditional theorists hoped citizens could recognize.”)

7. The Federalist No. 52 (James Madison), 328. See Glenn Fung, “The Disputed Federalist Papers: SVM Feature Selection via Concave Minimization,” Proc. 2003 Conf. on Diversity in Computing, 42–46, available at link #108 (presenting the results of a quantitative word analysis suggesting that Madison wrote Federalist 52 and noting that “[t]his result coincides with previous work on this problem using other classification techniques”).

8. That the very notion of corruption requires an appropriate baseline from which to measure is familiar. See, e.g., Thomas F. Burke, “The Concept of Corruption in Campaign Finance Law,” Constitutional Commentary 14 (1997): 127, 128 (“Corruption is thus a loaded term: you cannot call something corrupt without an implicit reference to some ideal…. [O]ne must have some underlying notion of the pure, original or natural state of the body politic”).

9. Teachout, “The Anti-Corruption Principle,” 341, 359–60.

10. See New Jersey Constitution of 1776, article XX, cited in John Joseph Wallis, “The Concept of Systematic Corruption in American History,” in Glaeser and Goldin, eds., Corruption and Reform, 34, available at link #109.

11. Adrian Vermeule, “The Constitutional Law of Official Compensation,” Columbia Law Review 102 (2002): 501, 509–10.

12. Teachout, “The Anti-Corruption Principle,” 341, 362–63.

13. Notes of James Madison (Aug. 13, 1787), in vol. 2 of Records of the Federal Convention, 267, 279.

14. By setting