Where in the Constitution does one find the separation of powers mentioned? Where does the expression “checks and balances” occur? They are not in the Constitution. We use them because they are terms upon the basis of which the Constitution was accepted. And it is the agreement reached on those things that constitutes the true [...]
I suggest a crisis by collecting in one breath the terms national character and political disorder. Nor do I shrink from the implicit affirmation that the people of the United States confront an identity crisis at the very center of our national existence, at once moral and political and touching precisely upon the reciprocal relationship [...]
Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, uniquely, have been lionized as merely “lending their names” to the founding. But at least one of these two greatest Americans of the eighteenth century was indeed a lawmaker and not merely a symbol in the Constitutional Convention. The title of this essay gives away its complete content, without suggesting [...]