The Founders' Key: The Divine and Natural Connection Between the Declaration and the Constitution and What We Risk by Losing It by Larry P. Arnn

Author:Larry P. Arnn [Arnn, Larry P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: ebook, book, History, Politics
ISBN: 9781595554727
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2012-02-14T00:00:00+00:00

As with the external controls, so with the internal we find an arrangement that takes account of the interest and the passions of the people involved. We find an effort to enlist these interests and passions on the side of a good result. This result is defined independently of the interests and passions. It is a thing outside our wants, outside even our needs unless those needs are defined comprehensively.

These internal controls are necessary because the “exterior provisions are found to be inadequate.” The “defect must be supplied, by so contriving the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.”24

The key to these internal controls is, therefore, in the separation of powers and in the division of power between the states and the federal government. Just as the external controls on the government are made possible by the representative nature of the government, so, too, is separation of powers. One cannot conceive of separation of powers in a simple democracy because the people are both the source of all authority in the government and the maker of the particular laws. When the people are assembled as a legislature and watching, no executive would dare to defy them. When they are away and distracted, the executive may run amok.25 If, on the other hand, the sovereign is excluded from the operations of the government, it may delegate a portion of its authority to one place and to another, each then standing on an equal footing.26

According to the Federalist, it is not sufficient simply to write down the duties of each branch and assign different officers to manage them. These are mere “parchment barriers.”27 They will likely be overcome by the prestige and relatively undefined scope of the legislature. On this point Madison quotes with favor his friend Thomas Jefferson, who had written in his Notes on the State of Virginia a well-known passage:

All the powers of government, legislative, executive, and judiciary, result to the legislative body. The concentrating these in the same hands is precisely the definition of despotic government. It will be no alleviation that these powers will be exercised by a plurality of hands, and not by a single one. One hundred and seventy-three despots would surely be as oppressive as one. Let those who doubt it turn their eyes on the republic of Venice. As little will it avail us that they are chosen by ourselves. An elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy as that no one could transcend their legal limits without being effectually checked and restrained by the others.28

“Not an elective despotism” might make a good subtitle for the Federalist. To avoid that fate, Madison writes that one must not only separate but also connect

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