Here are a few things you may or may not know about (my hero) James Madison, Founding Father extraordinaire, who was born this week (March 16) in 1751.

He was short — maybe 5’ 5” in his stocking feet, prompting his wife, Dolley, to call him “the great little Madison.”  His nickname, “Jemmy,” even sounds like someone who is short.

He was shy. He hated large gatherings and loathed the spotlight. At social functions he preferred to retire to the corner of the room and engage in quiet discourse, usually political, with a few trusted friends and advisers.

Fortunately he had a wife who enjoyed being the center of attention and who was one of the great official greeters and hostesses in the history of Washington society.  (Dolley Madison is the only First Lady to have served that function for two different presidents. When Madison was secretary of state in the Jefferson administration, President Jefferson, a widower, asked her to be his official hostess.)

He was a life-long hypochondriac.  Madison would tell anyone who cared to listen that he was sure to die young.  He wound up being among the last of the Founding Fathers to die — at the ripe old age of 85 — prompting him to say late in life, tongue firmly in cheek, “Having outlived so many of my contemporaries, I ought not forget that I may be thought to have outlived myself.”

He was self-effacing and polite to a fault.  He went out of his way to give others credit whether they deserved it or not, and he would concede the merits of an opposing argument regardless of how idiotic it happened to be — which, as historian Joseph Ellis has noted, allowed him to more easily demolish it.  “He seemed to lack a personal agenda,” Ellis writes, “because he seemed to lack a personality. Yet when the votes were counted, his side almost always won.”

Which brings me to the last thing you may or may not know about James Madison. After George Washington, he was the most effective and important of the Founding Fathers.

There are three documents that serve as the foundation on which our nation is built. They are the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  Madison is chiefly responsible for the last two.  He wrote the Virginia Plan on which the Constitution is based — earning him the title “Father of the Constitution” — and he created and engineered passage of the Bill of Rights, earning him the title “Chief Architect of the Bill of Rights.”

The Constitution is our owner’s manual and the Bill of Rights is our warranty (the Declaration, Jefferson’s, is our mission statement).  Not a bad life’s work.

For those of you not following the Republican contest for president, Newt Gingrich had a rather novel idea a while back.  He not only proposed establishing colonies on the moon, but also proposed that, upon reaching a population of 13,000, a moon colony could apply for U.S. statehood.  Leave aside that 13,000 people is far below the usual population requirement for statehood — after all, breeding on the moon undoubtedly presents some unusual challenges. Rather think of the travel difficulties those “moon state” elected U.S. senators and representatives would have getting to Washington to represent their constituents, while regularly returning home to stay in touch with those constituents (“Skyping” probably wouldn’t cut it).

All in all an impractical idea — and typical Newt.

But that said, also typical Newt, he has identified something important — not his “moon state” but his insistence that America go back to the moon, and beyond.  Perhaps not now — America is too deeply in debt — but surely at some point, because it is worth doing for reasons having little to do with a “green eyeshade” cost-benefit analysis, although, even there — as in our past space programs — we would see huge value in terms of new technologies developed and new discoveries made.  My guess is the solutions to our energy and environmental problems are out in space, and conducting scientific and biological experiments in zero gravity opens up possibilities unknown on Earth.

But the true value I see in space travel is, for lack of a better word, the value to our soul, to our sense of our place in the universe — the value in terms of our relationship with the cosmos, and therefore the incalculable value to ourselves.  For thousands of years, planet Earth was our center of the universe, our sole marker of our place in the order of things.  And then Copernicus and Galileo (and others) made us aware that planet Earth is actually just a tiny dot revolving around a minor-league star in the backwater outskirts of some huge galactic unknown.  And from that discovery came the natural, “in-our-DNA” urge to explore that huge unknown.

So we made that beginning with the early Mercury, Gemini and Apollo space programs.  And with those space flights — in particular Apollo 11’s landing of men on the moon — we truly came to understand that Earth is not the end of our journey, but the starting point for an unending, eternal journey meant to inspire all of us and give mankind a new purpose.   That changed forever our relationship to the “world,” just as it has changed forever our place in it.  And it has certainly changed forever us.   In that sense Newt is absolutely right.   We need to continue the journey.

Author’s Note:  Because I get so many emails asking me to weigh in on the modern-day issues related to the Constitution, governmental power, politics, the law, culture, religion and the like — the same topics I report on in my history blog — I will, on occasion, blog under the heading “Thinking Out Loud,” in which I will comment on those issues from my own personal, here-and-now perspective.  To that end — fair warning — whereas in the history column I am, for the most part, a dispassionate observer, in this occasional contribution to my blog, I will be opining and often taking sides.  My first “Thinking Out Loud” is below. Feel free to weigh in yourself.

Dina Galassini lives in the city of Fountain Hills in the state of Arizona, a state with a history of rugged individualism, a state in which the city of Tombstone became the largest city in the Arizona territory thanks to gold and silver prospecting (a rugged, individualistic enterprise if ever there was one).  Tombstone was named, by the way, after a miner who, while filing his claim to prospect for silver in a small patch of Arizona’s desolate and dangerous San Pedro Valley, remembered that several acquaintances had told him he would “find his tombstone” before he ever found the mother lode.  Puckishly, he filed his claim under the heading “Tombstone” and filed two later claims under the headings “Graveyard 1” and “Graveyard 2.”   Those acquaintances were wrong, as it turned out, and the miner, Ed Schieffelin, who co-founded the Tombstone Gold and Silver Mill Mining Company, became a very wealthy man.

In any case, Ms. Galassini, a long-time resident of this historically individualistic southwestern state, is (unsurprisingly) something of a libertarian — she supports Ron Paul for president — and as a result, according to a recent column by George F. Will, she was not happy with a $29.6 million bond measure proposed by the Fountain Hills city government.   So Galassini sent emails to 23 friends and acquaintances, urging them to write letters to newspapers and join her in two demonstrations against the bond measure.  But before she could organize the demonstrations, she received a letter from the town clerk that said, “I would strongly encourage you to cease any campaign-related activities until the requirements of the law have been met.”

And what “requirements of the law” had Galassini failed to meet in sending out her emails?  Arizona state law says that anytime two or more people work together to influence a vote on a ballot measure, they instantly become a “political committee.”   And when one magically becomes a “political committee” in Arizona, one must register with the government; one must file forms; and one must establish a bank account for the “political committee,” even if it has raised no money and has no plans to.  Further, these legal requirements must all be met before members of this fictitious “committee” may speak.

Astonished, Galassini sarcastically wrote to ask the clerk if, under Arizona state law, she was permitted to email the 23 persons telling them the demonstrations were canceled.  She got no response.  Confused, and not a little bitter, she gave up trying to influence the vote.

One other point.   In 2009, the Waxman-Markey climate change legislation, which passed in the House but died in the Senate, was more than 1,000 pages long.  Hundreds of amendments were added to it in the days and hours before the vote.   No one who voted for it, or against it, read the bill in its entirety.   By contrast, in September of 1787, the delegates to the Constitutional Convention finally approved and signed the U.S. Constitution — which is not a piece of legislation; it represents our entire government.  Written out long-hand, it was four pages long.  You can read it in a half hour.