The Founding Fathers designed our federal government with three branches: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. Each branch was assigned certain powers with this separation of powers designed to create a series of checks and balances preventing one branch from taking over the country.
One of the forms of government under consideration by our Charter Study Commission would involve a directly elected mayor [Executive Branch] and a council [Legislative Branch], thus adding a form of checks-and-balances lacking in our current form.
Unfortunately some local residents are opposing this basic tenet of The Constitution, with one forum poster disdainfully referring to the CSC as “hiding the divided, separated branches of government, with separate staffs, accountable to the separate branches of government.” Why would they hide one of the major doctrines of United States democracy?
The only argument these anti-Constitutionalists have made against this mayor-council form of government is the possible cost of separate branches. I guess those old Patriots were just a little shortsighted, right?
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For those who need a refresher course in this divided sovereignty, please reread The Constitution: Article 1 - Legislative Power, Article 2 – Executive Power, and Article 3 – Judicial Power.
Considering what is going on in Washington, I can understand the confusion of a few Hillsborough residents about The Constitution.
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In the best American tradition I tried to come up with an acronym for the anti-Constitutionalists, but I could only come up with Hillsborough Anti-Constitution Kulaks (HACKs). Any other suggestions?
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kulak: n. A prosperous peasant in czarist Russia. Wikipedia has an interesting entry on kulaks, including "relatively wealthy peasants in the Russian Empire who owned larger farms and used hired labour....the creation of a group of prosperous farmers who would support the Tsar's government...".
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2 comments:
Some good points made. This ploy of stoking fear by citing the scourge of "divided government" is a tactic well worth neutralizing quickly!
Love the acronym!
The word Kulak was actually a derogatory Russian term for farmer peasants who owned their own land. It meant, "tight-fisted". On the whole they were hard-working people just trying to make ends meet. But because they got in the way of the Soviet Communist efforts to collectivize farming, they were pretty much liquidated by the Soviet state.
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