Executive Branch Of Government

The system established by the Constitution consists of three separate branches of government: legislative, executive, and judiciary; with the most powerful branch, the legislative branch, being divided further into two separate houses, the House of Representatives, with representation based on population, and the Senate, with an equal number of representatives from each state. Each branch of government is independent with its own sets of duties, and, as mentioned before, can check the power of the other two branches. The judiciary branch is kept separate from the influence of the masses and is appointed by the President and approved by the Senate. Members of Congress, however, are directly elected by U.S. citizens and the President is elected
The Framers laid out a guide for how the government should be run, but, in some areas, were ambiguous and vague. A lot of things have changed in the last 200 years that forces us to look at the Constitution in a new light, revealing some of its key weaknesses. Economic crisis during the FDR administration resulted in what many would agree to be a necessary expansion of the federal government and its roles in economic affairs. However, the Constitution fails to guard against the gradual expansion of individual branches of the government, such as the executive branch. Over time the power of the executive has gone beyond the limits of the Constitution and surpassed that of Congress. Only the legislative branch can make and revise laws under the Constitution, but the Bush and Obama administrations have expanded the power of the presidency through the use of executive orders, bypassing Congress in order to push programs or legislation they want to be
Similarly, the manner in which presidents are elected through the electoral college system also presents some weaknesses in the modern era. The Framers did not trust the public to choose the President and established a system in which electors from each state elect the President based on the popular vote. Electoral votes are assigned to each state based on population, with a minimum of three electoral votes for each state. These electoral votes can be split proportionally between candidates or given to the candidate with the most votes in that state, in what is known as the winner-takes-all