How does modern party politics challenge the founders’ vision for the U.S. Constitution?
About this video
The speaker argues that political parties, which the Constitution never mentions and many founders feared, now undermine the founders' design. Members of Congress in the president's party often welcome the president taking power from Congress instead of guarding their own branch, which the speaker sees as a blind spot in the founding design.
You'll be able to
- explain why the founders expected each branch to guard its own power.
- explain how party loyalty can weaken checks and balances.
Key words
- partisanship
- Strong loyalty to a political party, sometimes above other loyalties.
- political party
- An organized group that tries to win elections and control government.
- blind spot
- Something important a person or plan fails to notice or prepare for.
Transcript
[Music] I think that every era has its own challenges I think that the thing that really strikes me about our moment and the founders moment is that we are seeing come to maybe fruition something that the founders did not foresee and that is the way in which political parties and partisanship would undermine the functioning of the Constitution so there's nothing about parties in the Constitution and a lot of the founders really feared the emergence of a party system but one starts forming almost as soon as you've got the constitution in place and one of the reasons I think we've got this problem with enforcing our constitution currently is that if you're in Congress you don't act the way the founders thought
you would in terms of jealously guarding the powers of congress against the president if you're in the same party as the president these days you're pretty happy to see the president take power from Congress that's a problem I'm not sure what the solution is and it reflects I think a real blind spot or weakness in the founding design
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