One of the continuing puzzles I come back to is the separation of powers: Where did the framers go wrong?

Political scientists often claim that it is norms that undergird the US Constitution, but this is not at all the view of the framers. If anything, the idea that norms underpin the Constitution, maintaining its delicate balance of separated and limited powers, is an almost pre-founders, naive view of things.

If you read James Madison — whom nobody would accuse of having a rosy view of human nature — in the Federalist Papers, he makes it clear that what preserves liberty and constitutionalism more generally is the separation of powers, and what preserves the separation of powers is . . . the ambition of individual politicians. Madison makes constant, and fairly smirking, references to moralists who would rely on the “better motives” of men to constrain power. “If men were angels,” he famously writes of such moralists, “no government would be necessary.”

No, the Madisonian solution is to rely on the “private interests” — more particularly the “ambition” — of politicians. Self-interested, ambitious men of politics will want, first and foremost, to have power. The genius of the system, thought Madison, is that it harnesses men’s self-interest and ambition to their exercising of a power that is specific to an institution. To be powerful, you have to be an institution man. If you’re an ambitious, self-interested member of the House, you’ll see that your interest and ambition will rise or fall on your exercising your constitutionally delegated power to initiate bills for taxes and spending or to impeach government officials. If you’re an ambitious senator, you’ll see that your interests and ambition rise or fall on your exercising your constitutionally delegated power to appoint judges and specific members of the executive branch or to approve or veto treaties.

Ambitious men are self-interested men. They seek power, and seeking power, they maintain the power of their institutions. Maintaining the power of their institutions, they check the overweening ambitions and power of men in other institutions. Thus are liberty and constitutionalism secured.

So now we come to our moment. Are members of Congress self-interested and ambitious? I would have thought so. They certainly don’t seem altruistic or careless about their careers. But their self-interest and ambition seem to lead them to do the exact opposite of what Madison — and generations of political scientists and historians — taught us they would do. Instead of maintaining their own power and checking that of others, they submit to other people’s power, they comply, and in the process they completely bargain away their power. For what?

This makes me think that the framers got it completely wrong. Ambition does not lead to exercising power against someone’s overweening designs. It leads one to cooperate with that overweening design. Perhaps, then, it was Jean-Jacques Rousseau of all people who got our system right: “Citizens only allow themselves to be oppressed to the degree that they are carried away by blind ambition.”