Our founders discussed our current crisis

 Hartmann Report -    It was Tuesday, July 17, 1787 and the men writing the Constitution had convened in Philadelphia to debate the separation of powers between the Congress, the presidency, and the courts. They drew their inspiration for that day from French philosopher Charles de Montesquieu, whose 1748 book The Spirit of the Laws had taken the New World and the Framers of the Constitution by storm.In it, Montesquieu pointed out the absolute necessity of having three relatively co-equal branches of government, each with separate authorities, to prevent any one branch from seizing too much power and ending a nation’s democracy. In The Spirit of Laws, he laid it out unambiguously:

 “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty. … Again, there is no liberty, if the judiciary power be not separated from the legislative and executive.”

As the topic of the separation of powers was being debated at the Constitutional Convention that day twenty-nine years after Montesquieu’s book had been published, “Father of the Constitution” James Madison rose to address the delegates:

“If it be essential to the preservation of liberty that the legislative, executive, and judiciary powers be separate, it is essential to a maintenance of the separation, that they should be independent of each other. … In like manner, a dependence of the executive [president] on the legislature would render it the executor as well as the maker of laws; and then, according to the observation of Montesquieu, tyrannical laws may be made that they may be executed in a tyrannical manner.

“He [Montesquieu] conceived it to be absolutely necessary to a well-constituted-republic, that the two first should be kept distinct and independent of each other … for guarding against a dangerous union of the legislative and executive departments.”

If the president were ever to dictate all terms to the Congress, which then became a compliant rubber-stamp regardless of how excessive or even illegal the president’s actions became, that, Madison said, “may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”We’re there now.  More