In 1789 the anti-federalists, people who objected to the ratification of the Constitution, argued that the newly proposed government would be unable to control itself and be unable to represent the interests of the common man. They were only somewhat correct. The Constitution separated governmental powers and provided a system of checks and balances to resist the formation of a despotic federal government, and the Constitution's federalist authors accepted the Bill of Rights into their statute, thereby protecting the rights of citizens. However, the anti-federalists accurately predicted the new government's over-representation of citizens in the wealthier but smaller classes. So although checks and balances and the Bill of Rights disprove the anti-federalist claim, the biased representation in the US government shows that those arguments were valid concerns.
After recently gaining their independence from the British Crown, no one in the US wanted to return to a tyrannical monarchy, so the Constitution's authors made a plan to divide government influences among separate branches and created a system of checks and balances to hold those branches responsible for one another. All this was done to prevent any one man from growing too powerful, and more realistically, to prevent the government from becoming too powerful. The first three articles of the United Sates Constitution discuss how to divide and check the powers of these branches. Article I deals with the Legislative Department. The first section of the first article says that all Legislative Powers shall be given to a body known as Congress and that Congress shall be divided into a Senate and a House of Representatives. The second section describes how the House is composed of electors that are voted for by the people. And the third section explains the Senate's powers and how Representatives choose Senators. The rest of Article I declares the powers and laws of Congress, including its powers over the other branches.
