RPA releases Tenth Party Principle: Separate and Independent Branches of Government

State Representative David Ray wrote this week on the Party's tenth principle, separate and independent branches of government. This op-ed is the final piece in a series on the 10 principles of the RPA platform.

“'There are several things I learned in Mr. Allen’s 11th grade American Government class that I quickly forgot and had to re-learn during college. At the time, I couldn’t have recited the Bill of Rights or told you the difference between The Stamp Act and the Alien and Sedition Acts. But two of the basic pillars of our American Republic that stuck with me were our Constitutional framework of separation of powers and our system of checks and balances that reinforces that framework.

"That framework – which divides the powers of government between three separate but co-equal branches – is not just fundamental to understand how our government works on an academic level, it’s also 'essential to the preservation of liberty,' as James Madison wrote in Federalist 51..."