The Founders knew that freedom is the foundation for dignity and prosperity.
The Founders knew that freedom is the foundation for dignity and prosperity.
I f man is to prosper and live in dignity, America’s Founders understood, he must be free. History had taught them that “power lodged as it must be, in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse,” as James Madison said. The Framers of the Constitution sought to design a government that would protect the liberty of the people without itself becoming a source of that liberty’s destruction. Throughout the nation’s history, and especially in the past century, those who desire political power have sought to lure Americans away from that vital design.
Like the nation’s Founders, Americans today must remember their history.
The Founders knew from history and their own experience that human dignity and prosperity depended on liberty. In turn, they knew that liberty depended on constraining those exercising government power. In his first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson asked whether “we have found angels in the forms of kings to govern.” Responding to his own query, he said, “Let history answer this question.”
The Founders recognized, as Madison explained, that government is “the greatest of all reflections on human nature.” And humans, by nature, tended to be corrupted by the power they wield. As John Adams wrote, “There is Danger from all Men. The only Maxim of a free Government, ought to be to trust no Man living, with Power to endanger the public Liberty.” Whoever governs, the Founders understood from history, those with power are prone to abuse it.
Yet government is necessary. The solution to this dilemma, the Framers saw, was a government of limited and divided powers. Because men are not angels, Madison said, “In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.” How? While popular accountability is “the primary control on the government . . . experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions.”
The primary “auxiliary precaution” the Constitution employs is the separation of powers. Under the governmental structure established by the Constitution, the government’s three primary powers — legislative, executive, and judicial — are held in different hands and set against one another as checks on the others’ power.
Under this constitutional system, Congress makes the laws, the executive branch enforces the laws, and the courts interpret and apply the laws in specific cases. Before the federal government can deprive a person of his liberty, all three branches must be involved, and the court must determine not only that he violated the law, but that the law is constitutional as applied to him.
The French political philosopher Montesquieu was, as Madison described him, “The oracle who is always consulted and cited” on the subject of the separation of government powers. Through his study of both classical and contemporary societies, Montesquieu had concluded that, to quote Madison’s summary, “the accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands . . . may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”
In a tyrannical government, the highest power is the whim of those who rule. In framing the Constitution, the Founders recognized that there is a higher authority than government that limits the just actions of those who govern. To paraphrase the Massachusetts constitution drafted by John Adams, a just government is one of laws and not of men. This rule of law established in practice that the power of those who govern is justly constrained by a higher authority: human dignity.
Beginning in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the progressives sought to abandon the system of limited government established by the Constitution and replace it with an unaccountable bureaucracy of supposed experts. To Woodrow Wilson, the most prominent of the progressives, the Constitution’s checks and balances on government power were counterproductive and outdated. Wilson argued that the cooperation of the powers of government “is indispensable” and their “warfare fatal.”
Accordingly, progressives sought to combine the powers of government in the administrative state — government agencies ostensibly part of the executive branch but capable of exercising legislative, executive, and judicial power — all without meaningful popular accountability. In this way, agencies would, and for decades effectively did, circumvent both Madison’s primary and auxiliary precautions. Recent Supreme Court decisions, however, have begun to restore the Constitution’s long-hobbled structure.
Despite this ongoing restoration, some on the right have recently begun to advocate wielding government power without regard for constitutional constraints to advance the “common good,” reliably a euphemism for the speaker’s own policy preferences. In an interview last year with National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, Justice Amy Coney Barrett rightly called the legal permutation of this movement “results-oriented.” In short, it is the rule of man, not law.
Like the progressives before them, those calling to redirect government power to the “common good” as they define it believe themselves to be advancing the interests of the people. This arrogant sense of moral superiority on the part of those who would wield power according to their whims is not new. As Adams wrote to Jefferson, “Power always thinks it has a great Soul, and vast Views, beyond the Comprehension of the Weak; and that it is doing God Service, when it is violating all his Laws.”
Today’s progressives, like those of the past, seek to tear down or circumvent the limitations the Constitution places on government power. Perhaps they have forgotten the lessons of history that the Constitution’s Framers found so instructive. Or perhaps they believe that their own wisdom is sufficient to overcome what history has shown to be the inevitable result of the accumulation of power.
Regardless, Americans must reject calls to centralize power in one institution or person, even when doing so is politically convenient for the moment. As Montesquieu warned, the consolidation of government powers in the hands of one person or entity “would be an end of everything.” The Founders knew this from their study of history and their personal experience. Americans must never forget that lesson.
Editor’s note: This is the third in a four-part series on constitutional order.