“Why do we have a Constitution?” – Senator Angus King (Maine Senator Independent)
“…to ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, ensure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity
…there is a paradox: the essence of a government is to give it power, but that power can be abused to hurt the very citizens who granted it.
The Framers were “deep students of history and…human nature. And they had just won a lengthy and brutal war against the abuses inherent in concentrated governmental power. The universal principle of human nature they understood was this: power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Who will guard the guardians? The Framers built into our system regular elections to return the control of the government to the people on a regular basis. .. deliberately divided power between the different branches and levels of government.
And, this is important,…the cumbersomeness, the slowness, the clumsiness is built into our system. The framers were so fearful of concentrated power that they designed a system that would be hard to operate. And the heart of it was the separation of power between various parts of the government. The whole idea, the whole idea! was that no part of the government, no one person, no one institution had or could ever have a monopoly on power.
Because it’s dangerous. History and human nature tells us that. This division of power, as annoying and inefficient as it can be,… is an essential feature of the system, not a bug. It’s an essential, basic feature of the system, designed to protect our freedoms.
The system of government contrasts with the normal structure of a private business, where authority is purposefully concentrated, allowing swift and sometimes arbitrary action. But a private business does not have the army, and the President of the United States is not the CEO of America.
In the government, power is shared, principally between the president and Congress, both houses …this unwieldy structure is the whole idea,… designed to protect us from the…inevitable abuse of an authoritarian state.”
From speech by Senator Angus King (severely edited here) via Heather Cox Richardson