James Madison continues his explanation of the separation of powers, arguing that its success requires that the “departments be so far connected and blended as to give to each a constitutional controul over the others.” Only such linkages and interpenetrations of the branches of government, and not mere “parchment barriers,” can deal with the fact that “power is of an encroaching nature” and will not stand still when told to do so.

Tightening his focus, Madison argues that one branch above all bears watching and needs restraint. In the nature of things, he says, the “legislative department” threatens to “draw[] all power into its impetuous vortex.” There are governments where the executive power is the most dangerous—in a traditional monarchy (not the merely ceremonial ones of our own day), or in a direct democracy where the legislative power is only in being when the people are assembled, leaving day-to-day governing in executive hands most of the time. But in a republic, says Publius, the legislature branch has powers “more extensive and less susceptible of precise limits” than any other, and it “alone has access to the pockets of the people.” In addition to its institutional strength, the legislature can plausibly trumpet its democratic credentials as the branch most representative of popular opinion. Much of the time it will be right to do so, but this is not always good news for good government.

Hence the Constitution, in ways that we will see in future installments, takes steps to restrain the legislative authority most of all and to bolster the other two branches. Only the success of the framers’ reform of republicanism could lend any plausibility to a title like The Imperial Presidency, the Nixon-era screed of the late Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (and it bears remarking that Schlesinger’s concerns about the powers of the presidency waxed and waned in exact correlation to the partisan control of the office). Or, for that matter, any plausibility to a title like the one on my first book, Against the Imperial Judiciary.

Still, the worries of the framers are vindicated anew in times like these, when the “impetuous vortex” of the Pelosi-Reid Congress attempts to bully the executive on the pretext of non-scandals like the U.S. attorneys’ firings, or when, as the Wall Street Journal says today, it acts like “a committee of Lilliputians whose main contribution is to tie down the President so that his policy fails” in Iraq.

(For explanation of this recurring feature, see here.)