Check(s and Balances)-Mate
- How are we going to balance power between the three branches of the government we're going to have thanks, to our New Constitution?
- We're going to set them up so that, by design, they keep each other in line.
- He's not going to bore you with the entire breakdown, but he's just going to drop some observations on how it might work.
- If we're going to have a government with separate, independent branches, then each branch should have a will of its own, and shouldn't have much influence in who gets appointed to the others.
- In theory, that means every government appointment should be decided by the people.
- Yay!
- Only, not yay.
- The people might not know exactly what qualifications you need to be, let's say, a Supreme Court Justice.
- Which is kind of important, considering that they're, you know, judges for life.
- It's totally fine that the president gets to appoint them, because since the president only holds office for so long Justices don't really have to worry about making the President happy.
- The president will ask senators for advice/approval, and that way a qualified candidate gets picked.
- Back to yay!
- The branches of government also shouldn't have the other branches decide how big their paycheck is.
- The Constitution should prevent any one branch from taking too much power, and to prevent any one person from doing the same.
- Yeah, people like power. The government's also run by people.
- If people were perfect, we wouldn't need government. If the people running the government were perfect, we wouldn't have to worry about it abusing its power.
- Sadly, until we perfect Skynet, the government's still going to be run by the same fallible people that they govern.
- So, checks and balances. You gotta build a system that regulates itself, and splitting the power-share does that pretty well.
- However, you can't split power three ways evenly down the middle.
- The legislative branch in a republic is usually the most powerful, since they kind of get to make the laws.
- The Constitution totally has an answer for that, and that's to split the legislative branch in half, forming the Senate and the House of Representatives.
- Each one also has a different way to elect members. We might need more safeguards here later, but for now it's totally fine.
- The Executive branch is also, naturally, kind of weak. No strong rulers and all, we learned that lesson the last time.
- So it gets the power to veto the legislative branch, which gives it some power and takes some more power away from the legislative branch.
- Long story short, breaking the government down into branches, then breaking those further down, gives you governments that will control each other while they get to control themselves at the same time.
- In addition to keeping the power of rulers down, we have to manage the power of—you guessed it—factions.
- Minorities tend to get smashed down by majorities, and there's really only two ways to stop that from going down.
- The first way is to make a "will of the community" not bound to whoever the majority opinion group is. That sounds pretty abstract and hard to do.
- The second is to have so many groups that it's hard to make a majority in the first place.
- Monarchies are really good at the first one, but the United States will be really good at the second.
- By breaking the government down, we also have made majorities harder to form.
- Governments want justice. They want it so much that, sometimes, liberty's lost in its pursuit.
- If a society always has the power for the majority to crush the minority, then it's just as unstable as anarchy. An individual can't really ever feel safe or protected by society.
- If that was the case, then any government would be able to take power so long as it protected its citizens. This is how oppressive governments form.
- That's why with the breakdown of the government into branches, the United States can ensure the safety of the individual while also not oppressing them at the same time.