[Carry_Okie]

The founders understood the paramount importance of defining what the government was allowed to do while expressly saying it was not allowed to do anything else. They understood powerful people very well and the powerful people’s mindset has not changed.

Oh really? If they understood so well that powerful people are inclined to mischief, why is it that there was absolutely NO ENFORCEMENT MECHANISM by which officers of the government would be punished for usurpation of power?

Show me that age and country where the rights and liberties of the people were placed on the sole chance of their rulers being good men, without a consequent loss of liberty! I say that the loss of that dearest privilege has ever followed, with absolute certainty, every such mad attempt. Patrick Henry, Saturday, June 14, 1788, First speech: Restraint on corruption

[Sherman Logan]

why is it that there was absolutely NO ENFORCEMENT MECHANISM by which officers of the government would be punished for usurpation of power?

Nonsense.

The enforcement provision was built in. It's called impeachment for judges and officers of the executive branch.

It's called elections for congressmen and senators. They can also be expelled by a majority of their own house.

That impeachment has become almost entirely a dead letter is not the fault of the Founders. It's the fault of cowardly congressmen, more interested in re-election than the good of their country.

I sometimes think we'd have a better country if about every fourth president had been impeached and removed from office.

[Personal Responsibility]

John Adams:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

The reason it’s for only a moral and religious people is that the moral and religious are less likely (not guaranteed, but less likely) to fall into the trappings of power.

There are all sorts of enforcement mechanisms built into our government. Elections and Impeachments for example. The crime is that they are not used to remove from power those that should be removed - those that threaten liberty.