It is a problem that our country has never faced. The designers of the US system of government built in an internal conflict that would act as a counterbalancing force, because after fighting a long and bloody revolutionary war and watching the Articles of Confederation fail, the founders understood the need for a federalized system of governance that also did not allow power to concentrate in one set of hands or branch of government.
This design is a key underpinning of our governmental system.
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In 1788, James Madison wrote in Federalist 51:
In order to lay a due foundation for that separate and distinct exercise of the different powers of government, which to a certain extent is admitted on all hands to be essential to the preservation of liberty, it is evident that each department should have a will of its own; and consequently should be so constituted that the members of each should have as little agency as possible in the appointment of the members of the others. . . .
It is equally evident, that the members of each department should be as little dependent as possible on those of the others, for the emoluments annexed to their offices. Were the executive magistrate, or the judges, not independent of the legislature in this particular, their independence in every other would be merely nominal. But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others.
The founders relied on human nature and the ambition of people seeking to protect their own power as a mechanism for each branch of government to check the others.
It was an imperfect idea, but it worked until 2025 when Republicans took control of the House, the Senate, and the White House, and surrendered their power to Donald Trump.
The United States is in the middle of the second-longest government shutdown in its history.
On Saturday morning, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) explained why Republicans won’t step up and end the president’s shutdown.
Read on to learn how Republicans’ surrendering their power to Trump will impact every American.
