Professor Thomas claims that the Two Foundings do not stand as starkly opposed to each other as I have argued. He accepts that “these conceptual clashes are familiar,” but denies that they occur because of the Two Foundings and suggests instead that they already existed in each of the original texts. He also denies my distinction between scholars who highlight stable and relatively immutable foundational ideas from those who study development. Let me briefly say, on the latter objection, that my purpose was not to create a false divide, but to explain change and continuity in American politics simultaneously, and to reconnect scholars in APT and APD in a common intellectual project (pp. 214–215). The Lovers’ Quarrel between two competing conceptions of federalism has, after all, created dramatic change in American politics (“durable shifts in federal authority”) while offering an enduring framework for contestation and reconfiguration. If it is a defining feature of the American experiment that so much change has happened alongside so much continuity; then perhaps it is because one cannot happen without the other.

On to the first, and more important objection: I actually do agree with Thomas that the Constitution itself is already bifurcated text. The question is why did it turn out so? I have proposed it is because the Second Founding was in effect a peace treaty between those who wanted a more decentralized federalism (and merely an updated version of the Articles of Confederation), and the Federalists (the Second Founders), who envisaged wholesale reconstitution into “a more perfect union.” The most visible incarnation of the compromise between the Second Founders with the First (beyond bicameralism) was the addition of the Bill of Rights to the original Constitution (which operated sans the Bill from 1789–1791), on the insistence of the defenders of the First Founding, the Anti-Federalists.

But just because the Second Founders managed to synthesize the principles of ’76 with the more nationalist agenda of the reformers in ’89 does not mean that the “founders” were all equal part Hamiltonian and Jeffersonian, or that it makes sense to think of them as a monolithic group. I agree with Thomas that the great leaders of the republic have worked very hard to reconcile these opposing currents. But the reason why these opposing currents needed (and continue to need) synthesis in the first place is because proponents of each of these currents, prioritizing one start date over the other, can both claim to be defending the original American creed. The powers versus rights tension I have highlighted, for example, wasn’t spun out of thin air. It is literally there in the first three Articles, and in the first ten Amendments: the two bookends of a bifurcated Constitution. And insofar as there was raucous debate over the prioritization of one over the other (Hamilton famously denied the need for a Bill in Federalist 84), we should stop speaking of the “founders” and the “founding” as monolithic. It makes little sense to speak of “original meaning” because in the beginning there were two.

Thomas uses Madison to bridge the gap between the Federalists and Anti-Federalists; but in so doing he must concede that the case would have been much harder to make had he started with Hamilton, the leader of the Federalist Party. There is a reason why Madison has come out as the more celebrated and cited “founder.” He is the modal founder to which more scholars refer only because he is the median founder—a Federalist before he became a Jeffersonian Republican. That he bridged the Two Foundings is something both Thomas and I agree; that there was serious bridging that needed to be done because of two sharply opposing legitimating templates is where we disagree.

It is the job of politicians and great leaders to synthesize and to square the circle of foundational but irreconcilable political principles such as states’ rights versus federal supremacy, but it is, arguably, the job of political scientists to call out these creative syntheses because this is precisely how politics is done and it is our job to explain it.