Hello and welcome to whistlestop, a podcast of the presidency. I'm John Dickerson of CBS News.

You may wonder why we spent four episodes on the founding meeting in Philadelphia in 1787. Well, just a couple of weeks ago, Senator Rand Paul quoted Montescue on the balance of powers during a debate over the president's assertion of emergency power.

This week, Democratic presidential candidates floated the idea of expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court and doing away with the electoral college.

These contemporary affairs directly relate to those issues bandied about in that hot summer in Philadelphia.

Nostodamus got nothing on us.

But the amazing predictive powers of the whistlestop Ouija board tell only part of the story.

Any time you're talking about or thinking about the presidency, you should return to the starting place.

If you have the starting place in mind, you'll understand whether the current system is

running smoothly along in those 230-year-old grooves or, in the alternative, throwing sparks

as the system flirts with bouncing off and into the ravine.

As seeking citizens with a few practical judgments and open minds, we should look not just at the structure of the system created in Philadelphia, but at the ideas behind that structure and the process that created it.

The balance of power system might need tweaking as it exists today, but we'll only know where and how to trim if we acquaint ourselves with the root motivations and objectives of the founders and their durable balance of powers document.

The presidency may have strayed far from the original conception, but when we look at the new form, is that form consistent?

With the original intent, and if not, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

We can't answer every question here at whistlestop headquarters, but we can at least start the motor on this damn episode.

Part four of this increasingly misnamed trilogy.

So here we go.

But first, a word from our sponsor.

Our whistle stop today is December 23, 1783. The commander-in-chief of the Continental Army

sits before the seated president of the Confederation Congress in Annapolis, Maryland,

preparing to hand over the commission assigned to him eight years earlier.

The form of George Washington's exit from public

...