[MRM]

The problem with quoting our founding fathers, especially Madison and Jefferson, is that they wrote a lot and you can find quotes to support pretty much any position. Kind of like using verses of the Bible to support your position. Jefferson, in particular, said a lot of things about freedom of the press before he was President. After he said a lot of things about how important it was to restrain an irresponsible press. To know what they meant you really need to understand when they said it (Moses is correct to include the date, without it the quote can't stand on its own) and the context in which it was said.

I think what he is saying is that the government was set up with checks and ballances, with each branch uniquely suited to do certain things. The way the exceutive is set up - a single person with the responsibility to execute the directives of the legislature - that branch lends itself most to aggressive militarism. It's just the nature of the beast. The executive branch executes the war and is therefore the branch that most likely to want to go to war.

So instead of vesting the decision of whether to go to war with the branch of government that has the incentive to do so, the Constitution deliberately separates the incentive to do or not do something from the branch of government who has the power to make that decision.

So I don't think he was condeming the execute branch so much as pointing out a fundamental beauty of our Constitution - that the separation of powers will naturally check the impulses of the branch of government that wants to do something because it is in the nature of that branch to do it.

In a company you never put your sales people in charge of deciding what sales to make - they would sell at a loss to increase their sales numbers. You don't put the legal department in charge of decising who to sell to because they would find all sales to risky and shut down the company. So the founding fathers put Congress in charge of setting the budget and the exective in charge os spending, Congress in charge of declaring war, the President in charge of waging war, etc.

Now if we could only figure out what the original intent of the founding fathers was on all points so we could get back to it.