Law Day Luncheon 2006
First Place Essay by Hudson Rhotenberry
One sweltering day in Philadelphia, the Pennsylvania sun hung triumphantly over the city as thirty nine out of fifty five insightful men voted to approve the product of their labor. These men are now known as the Founding Fathers, and the result of their toil was our nation’s Constitution. The United States’ government was meticulously crafted in order to distribute the weight of power onto the shoulders of three branches, rather than creating a single, dominant branch capable of tyrannizing the masses. To achieve this balance, the Founding Fathers created the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch. Each of these branches is independent of the others, but all branches must cooperate for a successful American government. This distribution of power along with the addition of the Bill of Rights amendments provided for the utmost security of the liberty and freedom of the American people.
Initially, when one considers the branches of American government, the first branch to come to mind is the executive. After all, the president does, to some extent, symbolize and embody the government of the United States. As former President William Howard Taft said, the president personifies the “dignity and majesty” of the American people. The Constitution declares the responsibility of the President and the Executive branch to be enforcing the acts of Congress, the resolutions of the federal courts, and all treaties signed by the United States. The creation of the Executive Branch and the position of the President must have been an unsettling process for more than a few of the Founding Fathers who feared the establishment of a monarchy. Thus the Founding Fathers created a safeguard of checks and balances on presidential power to put their weary minds at rest. Examples of such checks on the president include House of Representatives’ power to impeach the president and the Senatorial power to try the president.
When the Founding Fathers created our three branches of government, they originally intended for the legislative branch to be the most powerful, ruling force of our government. In Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Paper No. 78, Hamilton regards the legislature as “the purse” and claims Congress “prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated.” The fundamental obligation of Congress is lawmaking. However, our Founding Fathers also verified that the legislature would not become all-powerful by establishing checks and balances on it as well. For instance, the Supreme Court may declare laws developed by Congress unconstitutional and the President claims the power to veto Congressional legislation.
In Article III of the Constitution, Congress creates what is arguably the most significant branch of American government, the judiciary. The obligation of the judicial branch is the interpretation of the text of the Constitution, the “supreme law of the land.” Obviously the Founding Fathers had a vast amount of faith in their work to give it such a title and create a branch of government specifically to interpret it. The Founding Fathers had a good reason to be confident; they had conceived a Constitution ready to adapt and change with the times. From the world-worn minds of those prominent men came a government consisting of three separate branches sharing a balanced amount of power, an idea that was anything but conventional during the time period. The American people are fortunate to say that our Founding Fathers were pioneers plodding through the untouched soil of government.