Creating the Constitution - Assignment Example

At the same time, the Constitution is not a book of statutes and so, therefore, overlapping interests have historically provided the crux of difficulties. As such, the Constitution may be said to be the very model of moderation in politics; it manages to make up for the absence of federal authority sorely lacking in the Articles of Confederation while at the same not avoiding the pitfalls of conferring such authority at the federal level that states have no access to redress grievances. The Constitution managed to achieve this tilting the balance of power into the middle ground between the federal and state levels.

At the same time, the framers of the Constitution recognized that the primary failure of the Articles of Confederation was in giving too many rights to the states, leaving the federal government weak. The Constitution guaranteed that the ultimate power would rest in the hands of the federal government through the so-called "elastic clause" found in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution which endows the Congress with the power to "make all laws which shall be necessary and proper" to carry out its specific rights and responsibilities (Anderson 76).

The separation of powers and the system of checks and balances is the single most useful aspect of American democracy despite the fact it paradoxically seems to place limits upon the powers in charge. The necessity for placing limits on the three branches of government can be attributed expressly to the crucible in which the Constitution was drafted. The danger of not just executive tyranny, but also legislative and even judicious tyranny was ever-present in the minds of those who had captured their freedom through the shedding of blood.

The very concept of conferring authority upon a national government in which the legislative, executive and judicial branches were connected and working dependently upon the other would mean too much-concentrated power in too few hands. The writers of the Constitution instead looked to exploit the advantages of a fragmentary system of governance in which the three branches of the federal government work independently of each other, while at the same time being unable to act entirely on their own.

The brilliance of the division of power within the federal government is that each branch has been given just enough power to make a difference, but not so much power as to be allowed to successfully give in to the temptation of tyranny. Even today, in the atmosphere of an imperial President and lack of a strong legislative body, the idea that the President or Congress would actually engage in tyrannical methods seems far-fetched, but the framers of the Constitution who saw firsthand how absolute power could corrupt, it was truly a revolutionary leap forward.

The limitations on the power given to each of the three branches of government are known as the system of checks and balance and it is precisely the limits on power, rather than the authority given, that oils the machinery of democratic progress. Ambition has been counteracted by the placement of limits upon how much power the legislative, executive and judicial branches enjoy. For instance, the laws of American are created by Congress, but the President can use his veto power if he decides for some reason that the law is not just.