The federal government is not only broke, it’s broken. Our founding fathers established three branches of government as a means to keep each one in check. These branches are the executive, the legislative and the judicial.

The judicial branch, which includes the Supreme Court, is tasked with making sure that the other two branches do not overreach the boundaries established by the Constitution. In theory, the Supreme Court should be nonpartisan, but in reality the justices vote along party lines. The justices are selected by the president and confirmed by Congress. A liberal president will select a liberal justice, while a conservative president will choose a conservative justice. Historically, we have seen that the Supremes split the vote according to their ideologies rather than address an issue strictly by the Constitution.

We have seen this with the fourth and fifth amendments, as the courts have allowed the government to take away more of our freedoms. The ninth and 10th amendments spell out the limits of government, yet the judicial branch has allowed the other branches to take from the people powers that are not granted to the government.

The legislative branch is a total failure and operates mainly on a partisan basis. The Senate hasn’t presented a budget for the country in three years and the House of Representatives is spending us into oblivion. Both parties are so self-absorbed in their own ideologies that they are ignoring the will of the people who elected them. Each elected official has his or her own agenda and will not move from that position no matter how much it hurts the country.

Congress keeps raising the debt limit instead of cutting spending. Approximately 24 percent of our economy is federal spending. Much of the increase in federal spending originated in laws passed by Congress.

Congress also has failed to oversee governmental agencies and perpetuated this fiasco by not forcefully investigating agency breakdowns, such as “Fast and Furious” and the attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya. We are no closer to answers than we were when Congress first started their investigations. The administrative branch has hindered these investigations, thereby throwing the balance of government power toward the office of the president.

The president is the chief executive officer of the country. His job is to oversee the different elements of the government and make sure that they are doing what they were established to do. The problem with the presidency is that over the years, the president has taken too much control of the government. He has even by-passed Congress, making that branch ineffective.

Since the founding of the country, the president’s power has grown substantially to the point that he is the most powerful person in the world. I believe that this is too much power for any one person. The president’s power is going unchecked and unbalanced. Using executive orders, decrees, memorandums and national security directives, the president has full control over foreign and domestic policy without any controls from Congress or the Supreme Court.

The federal government is the largest government in the world. What happened to the Constitution’s limit of federal power?

Calderone is a conservative who lives in Midway and has written for trade publications in various fields.