Mike Johnson is right about the administrative state’s threat to the American Constitution:
We should be appalled of the inroads that the Administrative State has made into American governance and the peril the Administrative State poses to our Constitution. Our founding fathers were dedicated to an avowal of government based on fundamental principles; popular sovereignty, limited government, checks and balances, separation of powers, judicial review, and federalism.
The just powers of the government were to be derived from the consent of the governed. This affirmation of popular sovereignty and limited government can be examined quite simply. Should the people control government, or should government control the people? The founders opted for government of the people.
A major concern of the drafters of the new Constitution was the danger of tyranny and the avoidance of paths to inadvertently slide into tyranny. They feared tyrants such as King George III, but also worried about the “tyranny of the majority,” the downfall of democratic initiatives over the ages.
In Federalist #47, James Madison wrote:
The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands … may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.
The founders thus strived to separate the three functions of government, legislative, executive, and judicial, one from another; the principle of the separation of powers and the principle of checks and balances so intricately woven into the finished document. They recognized the frailties of human nature and used checks and balances, often setting ambition against ambition, as forces to constrain self-interest and restrain tyranny.
The founders did not consider the three branches of government to be equal. They anticipated that the legislative branch would be the most powerful (by virtue of the authority to make law) and that the judicial branch would be the least powerful of the three.
Read more: American Thinker
Image credit: The Manhattan Institute.
