The Founding Fathers wanted to get away from what they saw as the centralized system of government that had operated under the British. They thought this led to a lack of effective control and accountability, allowing government to ride roughshod over the rights and liberties of the people.

So, instead, they put forward the concept of the separation of powers. The idea was that, if the various branches of government were separate, then no one branch would be allowed to dominate the others. Allied to this was the principle of checks and balances, set out by James Madison in Federalist 48. Madison argues that each branch of government must have a "constitutional control" over each other. In common with the other Founding Fathers, Madison is intensely suspicious of political power, seeing in it the great harm it can do if not controlled properly. Power, of its very nature, seeks to expand and encroach. That being the case, the principle of checks and balances is needed to restrain the natural tendency of governmental institutions to accrue more and more power for themselves.