The necessity of some such check in the hands of the Executive is shown
by reference to the most eminent writers upon our system of government,
who seem to concur in the opinion that encroachments are most to be
apprehended from the department in which all legislative powers are
vested by the Constitution. Mr. Madison, in referring to the difficulty
of providing some practical security for each against the invasion of
the others, remarks that "the legislative department is everywhere
extending the sphere of its activity and drawing all power into its
impetuous vortex." "The founders of our Republic * * * seem never to
have recollected the danger from legislative usurpations, which by
assembling all power in the same hands must lead to the same tyranny as
is threatened by Executive usurpations." "In a representative republic,
where the executive magistracy is carefully limited both in the extent
and the duration of its power, and where the legislative power is
exercised by an assembly which is inspired, by a supposed influence over
the people, with an intrepid confidence in its own strength, which
is sufficiently numerous to feel all the passions which actuate a
multitude, yet not so numerous as to be incapable of pursuing the
objects of its passions by means which reason prescribes, it is against
the enterprising ambition of this department that the people ought to
indulge all their jealousy and exhaust all their precautions.
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