Why a separate branch of government?

Senator Mike Gravel
There’s a difference between a principle and an implementation detail, a process. And the principle that we’ve been guided by is one of independence. In fact, the judiciary under our system is independent of the executive and the legislative, other than the appropriation process, and the executive is independent of the other two in addition to the appropriation process and the legislative is independent. So if you’re going to go forward and set up a legislative—not a new government—you’re going to set up another legislative arm then you might be guided by the experience of 225 years and say, “Hey, let’s think in terms of setting this up totally independent of the other.” And when you talk about the Electoral Trust, so you can know what we had in mind, we had in mind the Secretary of the Senate and the Sergeant of Arms and the Fishbait Miller, who is the doorkeeper of the House. They manage the Senate, and I got to tell you, that’s all they do. They manage the minutia. They never get involved for fear of being fired outright because if any Senator got angry at one of those individuals, I got to tell you, that career is going to be aborted.
Unidentified Male
As I listened to Mr. Stern, he was talking about more Congressional involvement in the process that we’re trying to build and talking about competing measures being put into a legislature or not. I think that it’s a mistake to try to overly codify anything. We, as humans, have proven over and over again that the more we try to write something detailed to control an economy or to specify anything else, the more we’re likely to screw it up in the long term. Therefore, I suggest that we not fall into the trap of trying to specify what a relationship will be between the various legislative bodies. They will do their thing whether we try to specify it or not.