PORrado enTINUES

On Friday, June 1st, 1787, the Constitutional Convention convened in Philadelphia,

and on the agenda that day was a single question.

How much power should the executive branch have?

At this point, there was no executive branch yet, no president.

There was only Congress.

What began to frighten people who eventually would write the Constitution

was that the government seemed very ineffective.

It was bad at running the war.

It was broke.

It found it very hard to implement the law.

And of course, by the time you get into the mid-1780s, you know, people are worried.

The Revolutionary War was a fresh memory.

All of the social and political workings of this new nation essentially amounted to a big experiment.

There's domestic disputes at home, up in Massachusetts, a bunch of former soldiers

are taking over state armories and trying to get the legislature to forgive all their debts.

You've got British troops still stationed on American soil.

Other European powers kind of circling.

They're very nervous about the ability of the government to deal with it.

So, this was a really chaotic time.

And the framers of the Constitution began to think the only way to make order out of chaos

was to create an executive branch that would carry out and execute the nation's laws.

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