At Philadelphia they sought to write a constitution that would minimize the threat of corruption, but they had no illusions that the voters could be relied on to elect honest officials. They believed that voter preferences should be filtered by an intermediate set of politicians who could better judge the character of higher officials, and that the separation of powers would create a double filtration in which wasteful and self-interested bargains could not survive. That didn’t work out as expected, and there are two kinds of remedies that we might now try: seek to weaken corrupt influences,
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