Tag: Legislative Branch

New-York Packet

February 1, 1788

James Madison, under the pseudonym Publius, wrote about the system of checks and balances housed in the draft Constitution—and how fragile they are. Those checks and balances are “a mere demarkation on parchment of the constitutional limits of the several departments”—those departments being the legislative, executive, and judicial. And the demarkation of those limits was “not a sufficient guard against those encroachments which lead to a tyrannical concentration of all the powers of government in the same hands.”