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i think a lot of the dysfunction in our government arises bc the founders thought of the executive branch in terms of either the king or a colonial governor appointed by the king (or an absentee proprietor)
in their experience, the executive didn't exist in the same world of electoral politics as the elected legislature, and so even legislators who were rivals to each other were often united in defense of institutional perogatives against the alien executive
"checks and balances" just doesn't work the way it's supposed to when the president and one of the factions in the legislature are part of the same supra-institutional faction!
like the idea gets trotted out in periods of divided government, but it doesn't really work the way it was envisioned, in which the legislature and executive would be at inherently at odds and check one another no matter which faction controlled either of them
if you can't get 2/3 of one branch of the legislature to convict a president who literally sent a mob to murder them, that seems like pretty strong evidence that "checks and balances" only works between political parties, not branches of government
yeah it remains wild to me that all these guys went into government saying "the worst thing are political factions" and then immediately went and started political factions https://twitter.com/jfruh/status/1360349762763988993
i read this book a few years ago and it's really, really interesting! his take is that the "first party system" of federalist and democratic-republicans was really quite nasty because neither side saw the other as truly legitimate https://www.amazon.com/Failure-Founding-Fathers-Jefferson-Presidential/dp/0674023951
both factions saw the other as betraying the revolution's original ideals. when the federalists started getting squishy on the war of 1812 just in time for the dem-rep government to pull a tie out of the jaws of the defeat, the d-r's used that an opportuntiy to hammer them
they called monroe's term "the era of good feelings", but in fact former federalists were mostly frozen out of any government or patronage positions. the idea was that w/the federalists gone, the no-party vision of the founders could finally be realized
but within a few years the democratic-republicans broke up for good into rival factions, because it turns out one-party states are stable in democracies
