BY JULIA AZARI, MARQUETTE UNIVERSITY POLITICAL SCIENTIST
This anniversary is all about the Declaration, but right now it’s our Constitution that’s under significant strain. And there’s an essential democratic value underlying the American system that the Constitution sets up: the fragmentation of political power.
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The phrase “separation of powers” can be reduced to an abstract legal concept or a phrase that gets repeated until it loses all meaning. Nevertheless, it actually means something: The Constitution sets up a system that creates distinct centers of political power: the three branches of the federal government, and the states. None work for the other; all work for the people. Each is held accountable to the people and the Constitution in different ways.
Understanding this principle has held us together for this long, even at difficult and deeply contested moments. Americans have often disagreed about the balance of power between these different institutions – between the president and Congress (a topic often discussed in the current moment), or the states and the federal government.
Thinking about the meaning of the Constitution this way brings our current crisis into focus: It is deeply American to disagree about institutions and identity – the ends for which power is used. But efforts to consolidate power and concentrate it upward, rather than spread it out among equal and independent parts of government, and ultimately, among the people, amount to an effort to undermine a foundational American value.
