Montesquieu and George Washington
Our national government, in my opinion, was structured by following the writings of Montesquieu. Montesquieu wrote that leaders could not be trusted to always do what was right for the people and that govenment should be structured to keep the leaders of the government from acting in a selfish manner and passing laws that would help a select few instead of the majority of the people. That is exactly the way our Founding Fathers thought when they were writing the Constitution.
Montesquieu first had the idea of seperation of powers in a government. He thought if there were different branches of government, then no one branch would have too much power. He also thought that each branch of government should represent different groups of the population, so no one group would have all the power. Our government followed this almost exactly as he wrote it. We have the Congress which is divided up into two seperate houses, one being represented by people who are voted on by the population.
How many representatives there are, depends on the amount of people in an area. The other is voted on by the people, but are the same amount for each state. Montesquieu also believed in a checks and balances system, where one branch of government has the power to check on another branch, and that one branch could not force another to do what it wanted it to do, but it could make sure that the other branch was doing something it shouldn't do. I think our national government has followed this idea too.
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Our government is set up so that each branch can check on the other to make sure they are doing what they are supposed to do for the common good of the nation. Ours may go even further than Montesquieu's ideas, because our President has the power to Veto a law that has passed through Congress, but Congress can override his veto if they have enough votes. I think the men who set up our national government not only followed the ideas of Montesquieu, but believed his ideas were correct when structering our government.
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