The following is adapted from a talk delivered on March 11, 2024, at the Allan P. Kirby Jr. Center for Constitutional Studies and Citizenship on Hillsdale’s Washington campus, as part of the AWC Family Foundation Lecture Series.
The writers of our Constitution placed their faith not in specific guarantees of rights—those came later—but in a system of checks on government power. Foremost is the separation of powers among the three branches of the federal government, as well as between the federal government and the states. For this system to work as designed, people in each branch of the federal government and in the state governments must do their jobs and stay in their respective lanes.
