Despite their greatness as a canonical work of American political philosophy, there are at least three reasons that appealing to The Federalist Papers makes no sense. First, as briefs for only one side in a contentious debate, the Federalists hardly represented the views of all Americans, and while the Constitution was ratified democratically (more or less), The Federalist Papers weren't. Their logic and arguments have no popular imprimatur. Second, the papers aimed to persuade a fence-sitting public, and so in places they--like the language of the Constitution itself--remained deliberately ambiguous so as to attract as many supporters as possible. Third, they were written by three people and--again like the framers of the Constitution themselves--those authors disagreed on certain questions. Madison and Hamilton, for example, differed on whether they meant Congress to have the power to charter a bank. In general, arguments for originalism founder because on most questions there simply isn't one single thing that the framers intended.