Reining In an Out-of-Control Executive

Our Founding Fathers created three separate but co-equal branches of government to check and balance each other so no one branch would become all powerful. Indeed, James Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, "The preservation of liberty requires that the three great departments of power should be separate and distinct." Madison warned, "The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary in the same hands... may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny." The American colonists were reacting against a police state.