Day 6: Separation of Power

Separation of Powers: In Aristotle’s Politics he observed that every form of government performs three functions: “the deliberative, the magisterial, and the judicative.” The authors of the constitution understood that in spite of their fears of consolidating power leading to tyranny they could not have a functioning republic with an absolute or “pure” separation of powers. Therefore, they devised a plan for the separation of power that included checks and balances and is referred to as the “Madisonian Model.” This solution includes duties and responsibilities that are shared across the three branches of government along with the innovation that each branch of government arrives at their power through different modes of election.

“[Montesquieu] did not mean that these [branches] ought to have no partial agency in, or no control over, the acts of each other. His meaning…can amount to no more than this, that where the whole power of one [branch] is exercised by the hands that hold the whole power of another, the fundamental principles of a free constitution are subverted. [T]here is not a single instance in which the several [branches] of power have been kept absolutely separate and distinct”  - James Madison, The Federalist Papers

“You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”  - James Madison, The Federalist Papers