Issue 41.15
We are going to take a few minutes to consider the incredible wisdom of the founders in providing checks and balances in our government. The reasons and concept of this approach were made clear in the Federalist Papers (which we have been looking at recently) when James Madison wrote Federalist Number 51.
For me, this article (Federalist 51) is the most important of the group. In it, Madison explained the safeguards against tyranny that the founders carefully constructed to keep our people free and our nation strong while defending the individual liberties that they so prized.
Philosophically, Madison made a number of observations that are critical to understanding why a republic is the most powerful of all man-made forms of government, both in protecting individual rights and in providing a system where initiative, principle and hard work can provide wealth and power to a nation and to its citizens. The first of these is his acknowledgement that men (and women) who embark into public service are in general naturally ambitious. He carries this on to conclude that ambitious people will naturally seek to gather more power and gather followers and those of similar mind to amplify that power and control more people, more money, more land, etc.
His primary point was that, to avoid this evil (and he did believe it was a destructive tendency in many humans) you first had to severely limit the power of centralized government, reserving that power to the people and to more local governments. Then you had to further limit the power of each part of that government so that no one part could usurp or control those parts delegated to other sections of the government. He considered the legislature to be the strongest part and provided a planned division of that segment where the two houses of congress would check and balance the other.
The thinking that came to fruition in the US Constitution was that, power in a society or country is a limited commodity – a zero sum game as some term it. If the government becomes more powerful, that must come at the cost of the power of the individual. The government of a country needs a certain amount of power to defend itself and its people, to negotiate as a representative of those people with other societies or governments, and to create systems that support commerce, transportation, education, health and general well-being at the request of the citizens. You will notice that we are saying “create systems that support” rather than “provide”. It was unthinkable that government would presume to take on the impossible job of providing what the people need and want, because to do so, the government would have to be so powerful that there would be very little power and decision making left to the people and to the states. The Ninth and Tenth Amendments were placed in the Bill of Rights specifically to provide protection so this type of despotism would not occur.
Next time, we will look at the specific divisions of power that the framers of the Constitution created to protect that limitation on power and the way checks and balances keep one segment of government from assuming too much power – and we will also look at how these checks and balances have been compromised and even destroyed in some cases over the last 100 years or so.
Lynn West is a thinker, a teacher and a patriot. You can reach him through email at forgingthefuture2021@gmail.com or through this newspaper. Liberty is a state of being which must be continually created. These articles can help all of us discover the ways we can contribute to that outcome.