Baron De Montesquieu's The Spirit Of Law

Today in the United States of America trust in the government has taken one of the top spots in issues that are particularly important to its citizens. In a Gallup poll, it was reported that 81 percent of American’s hardly ever or never trust the government to do what is right with our country. The ironic aspect of this is the framers of our Constitution never intended for government to be trusted and felt that the Constitution needed to be built in order to accommodate the distrust that will inevitably occur in the future. Not only did they feel distrust for the government itself, but they also had lack of faith in popular elections and a direct distrust in the citizens of the country they were about to create. Ultimately, the founder created
Baron de Montesquieu, a French lawyer and political philosopher, presented an idea in his writing of The Spirit of Laws, which would directly help the unavoidable truth that a government, especially one with democratic ideals, cannot be left unchecked and full of power. The idea was a separation of powers into three distinct branches, each holding separate powers and jobs that would be able to give checks and balances on each other known as a tripartite system. Montesquieu felt that by having these separate branches it would avoid giving one area of the government too much power and thus becoming corrupt. The early settlers of America experienced this first-hand when they were still living in England, the British king was trusted with complete control of the government resulting in the corruption and torment that the people of England had to live in. Humans are power hungry by nature, meaning that they want to control more and more until they have destroyed everything. The framers of the Constitution used Montesquieu’s ideas and formed the Judicial, Executive, and Legislative branches of government to keep the power separated and avoid giving too much control to one person or one group of people creating an example of the distrust in the creation of our
Skeptic stated that the creators of the Constitution not only did not trust the power the federal government would get but they also did not trust the people who would be electing the officials. This is clearly evident in the creation of the electoral college. According to Kevin Wandrei of Demand Media, the Founding Fathers created the Electoral College, “primarily out of distrust for majoritarian democracies” (Wandrei 1). The Electoral College is used in the election of the president. In a true democracy the people would have the only say in who was elected president and whoever the people voted for would become president. The Framers did not have the faith that the electors would be educated enough to make such an important decision as electing the most powerful leader in our country. They solved this by creating a body of people with the task of electing the president and vice-president. The Electoral College consists of 538 electors, a majority of 278 are needed to win the election (U.S. Electoral). Despite the complexity of the system, the Electoral College works much in the same way the general election works, each elector submits a vote and whichever candidate receives the most votes wins the election. So if the process is basically a smaller election then why did the Founding Fathers create the Electoral College? The answer is distrust, distrust that the people would take the time and learn about the candidates and what their policies are and would