Checks and Balances: The Beauty of the Constitution

April 7, 2014 by Rowan Besthe

Ideological polarization in the nation is at an all-time high. So much so, it is palpable. Anticipating the human nature that we are currently seeing, the prescience of the founding fathers resulted in their brilliant crafting of the Constitution. Preventing the ideological polarization is the implementation of the checks and balances among the three branches of government.

However, another beauty of the Constitution is that the checks and balances also resides within us, the citizens. If the citizens truly understood this Constitutional concept of checks and balances, they would not want a polarized country. It is the swinging pendulum analogy: as the pendulum swings farther in one direction, it will swing farther and faster in the other direction. There are two implications of this effect: 1) when one end of the ideological spectrum pushes the bounds of constitutional limits, as the Obama Administration has done, the other end of the ideological spectrum is free to push those same constitutional limits in the opposite direction because of precedence – the farther the swing; and 2) the farther the constitutional limits are pushed, the harder opposing citizens will push back in the opposite direction – the faster the swing.......Read More Here....