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December 4, 2023

“The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government—lest it come to dominate our lives and interests.” —Patrick Henry

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Periodically, the world produces a demonic leader who challenges the legitimacy of established order with force or an ideologue who does the same with utopian ideas. Nevertheless, America’s Founders refused to prevent those people from pursuing political office within the bounds of legality. Instead, with their foresight, they crafted the Constitution not to prevent those individuals’ rise to power but to safeguard against their destructive impulses via constitutional restraints. Unbeknownst to many, though, Wilsonian progressives broke one of those restraints in 1913, mortally wounding the American experiment.

When the Founders set out to keep tyranny from infecting the federal government, two of the most important and interrelated safeguards were the separation of powers and federalism.

Because so many Americans are not fully acquainted with their country’s history, we must revisit the original provisions of the United States Constitution, which laid the foundation for this great country. The U.S. Constitution emanated from the Great Compromise of 1787. At that time, the United States was a union of independent states trading some of their independence for the common defense, collective security, and general welfare.

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To preempt usurpation of power, the federal government’s authority was split between three branches of equal weight. Although the Founders did not explicitly articulate in the Constitution itself what they were doing, the overriding impetus was to contain the Executive branch because its control over the armed forces and government bureaucracy meant it had the greatest ability to challenge the other branches of government to alter the established pattern of constitutional authority.

Image: The United States Senate floor. Public domain.

The states, in turn, joined the Union on the condition that their sovereignty would be protected. The House of Representatives was intended to be a “People’s House,” with representatives directly elected by the people in their respective districts. Senators were to be selected by state legislatures to represent the states to ensure their sovereignty.

To emphasize this point, the Senate was never intended to represent the interests of the people per se; it was intended to represent and zealously guard the interests of the states. By giving elective power to the states, the framers of the Constitution had constrained the role of the federal government solely to the responsibilities delineated in the Tenth Amendment:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

James Madison, the acknowledged father of the Constitution, explained in Federalist Paper No. 45:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce. The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives and liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement and prosperity of the State.