Would the Founding Fathers Recognize Their Government?

Imagine this. It’s Philadelphia. 1787. For months, a room full of men argue over how much power one body of government or one person should hold. They fought a war, escaped from a king’s authoritarian rule, and managed to cobble together a government system obsessed with keeping any one branch of it from grabbing too much power. Each state holds most of the real authority. Congress? They write the laws. And the president? He makes sure they are carried out. Nobody in 1787 imagined what this system would look like in 250 years.

But here we are, two hundred fifty years later. Our government’s shape morphed in ways even the most imaginative founder wouldn’t have ever imagined.

Initially, our founders built a system of governance in which President Washington handled a very short list of responsibilities, including national defense, currency, and relations with other countries. The remaining responsibilities fell to each of the individual states. A farmer in 1790 rarely thought about the federal government, if he considered it at all. His life ran through his town, his county, and his state legislature. Today, federal agencies touch almost everything from the food on your plate to the air in your city, the school your kid attends, and all your prescription medications. Wars, economic crises, and a country growing outward from thirteen states clinging to the Atlantic coast into a continental superpower all pushed authority toward the center. Nobody flipped a switch; instead, it happened slowly, gradually, decade by decade, crisis by crisis.

Read Article II of the Constitution, and in it you’ll find the president’s post strikingly modest. Execute the laws. Command the military, if and when called on. Make a few appointments. But the founders worried far more about Congress becoming a tyrant than the president. Our twentieth century handed the office of the president two world wars, a nuclear arsenal big enough to blow up the entire planet more times than we can count, and a federal bureaucracy the size of a small country. Or the United States of America. Somewhere along the way, the office of the president became the face of American government itself — the thing people vote for, blame, and credit, even though Congress still writes the checks and passes the laws.

It’s often overlooked that our founders did not design a democracy where every single adult in our country gets a say. Both political parties forget this. States picked senators through their legislatures, not ballots, until 1913. Plenty of adults couldn’t vote at all because they either didn’t own property, weren’t white Anglo-Saxons, or were male. Over two and a half centuries, one group after another fought for a place at the table, a piece of the pie — and won. The buffers between “the people” and “the government” eroded amendment by amendment, protest by protest, court case by court case.

It doesn’t mean our founding fathers got it wrong. Or that today’s version of our democratic republic is better or worse than theirs. It means they built something that bends without breaking. It’s actually been doing exactly that, bending, for 250 years. It’s the question that historians, judges, and dinner tables across the United States of America are fighting about to this day – and probably will in another 250 years.

Would they call this system broken?

Or would they just call it 250 years old?