62% of Americans say the federal government has too much power. That's the highest number ever recorded. What most of them don't know is that the founders predicted this — and built a system specifically designed to prevent it. The system is still there. We stopped using it.
THE MOMENT
A 2025 Gallup poll found that 62% of Americans believe the federal government has too much power. It is the highest reading Gallup has recorded since it began tracking the question in 2002 — up from 51% just the year before. WSIU Public Broadcasting
That number is worth pausing on. Nearly two in three Americans — across political lines, across regions, across demographics — feel that the government they live under has exceeded something. They cannot always say what it has exceeded. They feel the weight of it without having the language for it.
The founders had the language. They had it because they had thought more carefully about power, human nature, and institutional design than almost any group of men in the history of Western civilization. And the system they built was a direct response to exactly what 62% of Americans are feeling right now.
The question worth asking on the 250th anniversary is not whether the government has too much power. Clearly it does. The question is why the system designed to prevent that is no longer preventing it — and what Americans who understand the design can do about it.
THE STORY
The men who wrote the Constitution were not optimists about human nature. They were realists — formed by Scripture, by classical history, and by their own experience of watching power corrupt the men who held it.
James Madison, the primary architect of the constitutional structure, put it plainly in Federalist No. 51: "If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary."
Men are not angels. The founders knew this not as a political observation but as a theological one. The Christian tradition they had been formed in — even those among them whose faith was complicated — carried a specific anthropology: human beings are capable of great good and catastrophic evil, and the capacity for both lives in the same person. Power does not create corruption. It reveals and accelerates what is already there.
Trust in institutions is near historic lows, especially for the federal government and the courts — which likely underlies growing worries about overreach. This is not surprising. It is the predictable consequence of institutions that have expanded far beyond the design parameters the founders built for them. A system engineered for a limited government operating under constant checks will fail — predictably and visibly — when those checks are removed and the government is no longer limited. WSIU Public Broadcasting
The founders built three separate branches, each with specific powers, each with tools to check the others. They divided power between the federal government and the states. They reserved rights to the people that no level of government could touch. They did all of this not because they distrusted the Constitution. They distrusted themselves — and every person who would ever hold the offices the Constitution created.
WHAT IT REVEALS
The doctrine behind the constitutional design has a name. Madison called it the "auxiliary precautions" — the structural safeguards that do the work of restraining power when virtue alone is insufficient. And he was clear that virtue alone would always be insufficient.
The founders were not building a system for angels. They were building a system for human beings — fallen, ambitious, self-interested human beings who would, given the opportunity, expand their power at the expense of others. The constitutional architecture was designed to make that expansion as difficult as possible by ensuring that every branch of government had both the motive and the tools to resist encroachment by the others.
This is what most civics education misses. The separation of powers is not a technical arrangement for organizational efficiency. It is a moral statement about human nature. It says: we do not trust any one person, or any one institution, with unchecked authority — because we know what unchecked authority does to people. It corrupts them. Not always dramatically. Usually gradually. Ambition expands to fill the space available to it. The founders designed a system with as little space as possible.
The administration has usurped Congress's power to appropriate federal funds and threatened the judiciary's authority to check presidential overreach. Whether one views those actions favorably or not, the pattern they represent — executive power expanding into the territory of other branches — is exactly what the founders designed the Constitution to prevent. It is also not new to this administration. The expansion of executive power has been a bipartisan project for more than a century. Every administration has taken more than it gave back. The 62% who feel the weight of it are feeling the accumulated result. KPBS
THE FRAME
The founders did not invent the idea that power corrupts. They inherited it — from the Hebrew prophets who warned Israel's kings, from the Roman historians who documented the republic's collapse, from the English constitutionalists who fought the Stuart monarchs, and from the Calvinist tradition that produced much of New England's political culture.
John Calvin's political theology, which shaped the Puritan founders of Massachusetts and ultimately much of the constitutional tradition, held that civil government exists precisely because human beings are fallen — and that fallen human beings in power require institutional constraints that righteous human beings in power would not need. The separation of powers is, at its root, a Calvinist idea dressed in Enlightenment language.
What the founders did was translate that theological realism into institutional architecture. They asked: given that every person who holds power is capable of abusing it, how do we build a system that produces good governance despite bad people? The answer was not to find better people. It was to build better structures — structures that made abuse difficult, accountability unavoidable, and power genuinely limited.
That architecture is still in the Constitution. It has not been amended away. What has changed is not the design but the citizenry's willingness to demand that it be honored — and their knowledge of the design well enough to recognize when it is being violated.
WHAT IT ASKS
Thirty-three days from now America turns 250. The 62% of Americans who believe the government has too much power are, whether they know it or not, agreeing with James Madison. They are feeling something the founders predicted, named, and designed against.
The question is whether they know enough about the design to demand it be restored.
That is not a partisan question. Executive overreach has been a bipartisan project. Congressional abdication has been a bipartisan failure. The judiciary's inconsistent application of constitutional limits has been a bipartisan disappointment. The founders' system is not a conservative system or a liberal system. It is a human system — built on the realistic assessment that no one should be trusted with unchecked power, regardless of their intentions or their party.
The ask this week is not to pick a side. It is to learn the design. Read Federalist No. 51. It is four pages. It contains the clearest explanation ever written of why the American system is structured the way it is and what happens when that structure is abandoned. Read it before July 4th. Read it as what it is: a warning from men who understood human nature well enough to build a system against it — and a challenge to every generation that inherits that system to understand it well enough to defend it.
FURTHER READING
Federalist No. 51 — James Madison. Four pages. The founding document of the separation of powers argument. Read it before July 4th.
The Federalist Papers — Hamilton, Madison & Jay. The complete collection — the most important commentary on the Constitution ever written, by the men who wrote it.
THE GUARDIAN'S LENS
The founders built a government they didn't trust because they understood that trustworthy governments are not produced by trustworthy intentions — they are produced by trustworthy structures. Sixty-two percent of Americans currently feel what the founders predicted: that power, given sufficient time and insufficient restraint, will always expand beyond its design parameters. What most of those Americans do not yet know is that the design to prevent it is still in the Constitution — waiting to be enforced by citizens who understand it well enough to demand it. Thirty-three days remain before America turns 250. The founders held up their end. The question is whether we will hold up ours.
Learn more at theguardianscross.org.
About The Guardians' Cross The Guardians' Cross is a formation and cultural engagement ministry helping Americans reclaim their identity, their nation, and their destiny. We publish The American Guardian three times a week — analysis that goes deeper than the headlines. If the ideas in this article resonate, there is more at theguardianscross.org.
