This Speakout was written by Bob Burns, SDSU professor emeritus of political science.

There is universal agreement among students of U.S. history that the framers of the U.S. Constitution were committed to a decentralization of the power of government to avoid the emergence of another monarchy from which our young nation had just broken free.

The framers achieved this decentralization of power by dispersing that power through U.S. constitutional frameworks that we were introduced to in our civics education— separation of powers, bicameralism, checks and balances and federalism or a sharing of powers between a new national government, the various states and “We the people.” While all of the frameworks are important in preventing the coming or a new monarch of modern-day dictator, I want to give special consideration to separation of powers.

Again, we learned in our civics education that the framers included language in the proposed new Constitution that separated the power being delegated to the national government into three different powers — legislative, execution, and judicial. We find this separation in Article I legislative Article, Article II Executive Article and Article III Judicial Article.

Each article creates an institution of government — U.S. Congress, president of the U.S., U.S. Supreme Court — and enumerates powers for each new institution. The understanding behind the separation of powers was that “We the people” are delegating these powers to the respective branches of government to be held in trust by the elected or appointed officials of each branch and are not to be further delegated or abrogated to officials of sister branches or private parties. It was further understood that the officials of each branch would not covet the powers of the sister branches. To do otherwise would be to breach a fundamental maxim of the U.S. Constitution.

The first power delegated to the U.S. Congress is the power to tax and spend (Art. I, Sect. 8, Cl. 1). Congress is also delegated the power to authorize the creation of executive departments (Art. II, Sect. 1 or the Vesting Clause), These powers have been placed in trust to Congress by “We the people.’ These powers are not to be further delegated nor abrogated. No sister branch shall covet these powers. Yet, here we are. The president of the United States acting through the richest man in the world is randomly freezing the expenditure of funds appropriated by Congress, arbitrarily dismissing government civil service employees protected by law of Congress and dismantling executive departments and independent agencies created by Congress while the majority party in both chambers of the U.S. Congress stands by and offers no objection. In addition, a large body of “We the People” offers no resistance and indeed commends this breach of fundamental maxims of the U.S. Constitution. The future of our fundamental law and our nation itself is now in the hands of a federal judiciary that at the top appears to be guided more by political ideology than by legal principles and doctrine.

A fictional history records that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. In nonfiction history, the Roman Empire, the greatest empire known to the world, fell to internal strife and external threats. Will our fate be any different if our leaders who have sworn an oath to uphold the U.S. Constitution and “We the people” chose to fiddle rather than defend the fundamental law of our land?