peculation

“He might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression,” he said, according to the minutes.

Professor Turley: In the end, the framers would reject various prior standards including “corruption,” “obtaining office by improper means,” betraying his trust to a foreign power, “negligence,” “perfidy,” “peculation” and “oppression.”

“He might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression. He might betray his trust to foreign powers.”

A president “might pervert his administration into a scheme of peculation or oppression,” Madison worried, for instance.

But, despite some abstruse Jamesianisms like “instauration,” “peculation,” “invigilator,” and — my favorite — an “inspissatedly expressed and barely scrutable conjecture,” he tempers his stylistic mimicry to appeal to modern tastes, with shorter paragraphs and heightened urgency.