hey everybody Welcome Back check yourself before you wreck yourself by Smashing that like button it's a federal 51 joke you'll get it Federal 51 is basically about one thing separation of powers and checks and balances Madison jumps right in opening the essay by asking how can we maintain the necessary partition or separation of power among the several departments meaning branches as laid down the Constitution his solution is the only way to do this is to make sure that each branch of government will keep the other branches in their proper place this is our first reference to checks and balances each branch has to have not only the incentive but also the ability to guard its own powers from the other branches Federal 51 is probably the most famous lines of any Federal's paper one of which is that ambition must be made to counteract ambition say what you will about Madison but dude understood human nature he's saying that people in power are always going to be ambitious to get more power for themselves but here the system of checks and balances yields a clever solution to the problem the danger is that each branch is going to try to get more power for itself but if every branch is trying to increase their own power they'll also be quick to protect their powers from being violated by the other two branches and this ensures that none of the three branches will become too powerful it's like a three-way tug-of war where everybody is pulling as hard as they can on the Rope but since there's two others pulling against them nobody is able to dominate and get all the Rope themselves the next reasonable question might be well why do we need to worry about any one part of government giving too much power Madison answers this by returning to human nature saying that it's because of human nature that we need to control the abuses of government he asks a rhetorical but deep question what is government but the greatest of all reflections of human nature if men were Angels no government would be necessary let's pause here he's saying if humans were perfect we wouldn't need a government remember the whole reason we need a government is to protect people's rights from being violated by other people so if people were perfect there wouldn't be crime or war and nobody's rights would be violated so we wouldn't need a government and if Angels were doing the governing we wouldn't need to worry about separation of powers or checks and balances because those governing Angels would be perfect so there would be no threat of government abusing its power however in the real world we have men and women governing other men and women so madon says this is difficult because you first must enable the government to control the government but you also must oblige it to control itself this is the age-old question about the right amount of power for a government to have it has to be strong enough to do its job of protecting people's rights but you also need to make sure to limit its power so it can't become abusive and actually take away people's rights so that's the main idea but there are a few other things you can take away from federal 51 and have in your back pocket for the argument essay Madison assumes that in a republic Congress would be the most powerful branch of government so he says all right we have to take that power and divide it further this is an argument for a bamal legislature where the power of congress is divided between the House and Senate intentionally making it more difficult to pass legislation you might be asking yourself why would they want to make it tougher to pass legislation Madson says it's going to be slower tougher and more difficult but that's because if it were too easy to pass laws Congress would have too much power and individual rights would be in Jeopardy so yeah you know how people are always complaining that Congress never gets anything done well that's exactly what Madison wanted Madison briefly discusses another way to keep the power of congress in check this is to increase the power of the president by giving him a veto over Congressional legislation interestingly though Madison argues this can't be an absolute veto because that would shift power too much to the president so instead the Constitution lets the President veto legislation but Congress can override it with a 2/3 vote While most of federals 51 is about that battle between the branches he does discuss federalism a little bit here you'll recall that Federalism is the division of power between the states and the new federal government and the idea here is similar make sure that no level or part of government has too much power so he describes the us as having a compound Republic meaning that it's divided between two distinct governments state and federal and then the federal government is subdivided into three branches the legislative executive and judicial he says this establishes a double security to the rights of the people as the states and federal governments jealously defend their powers from each other Bill ensure that the other stays limited leaving the people safer than it'd be if there were only one government as you can see limited government is a major theme of this essay as really everything He suggests separation of powers checks and balances and federalism are all ways to ensure that governmental power is limited and that people's rights are protected Madison does briefly highlight the idea of federal 10 again in this one mentioning again the danger of factions but again asserting that a large Republic is the best way to mitigate that threat and to ensure that we have majority rule that doesn't end up trampling minority rights later on Madison says that Justice is the end of government it's the purpose of government it's the purpose of civil society and happily he says he has the solution to those problems of a tyrannical government of Injustice of Anarchy of tyranny of the majority it's a republican form of government with a healthy dash of federalism all right well that's Federal 51 until next time this has been a l money production thanks again for watching and if you want to do your best in this class and on the exam consider checking out the ultimate review packet three full length practice tests great study guides tons of practice for each unit exclusive FR frq help and practice preview unit one for free and I will see you in the next video