Starting a Government

This is the place where what I know about how the human mind works comes in a little handy.  I, by virtue of being a student of the Bible and also a Presbyterian, have some experience with legal charters of various sorts.  In Seminary we learned about the various and sundry covenants that underlie the narrative of the Hebrew Scriptures.  We took some time to learn about the Code of Hammurabi, one of the earliest examples of a Suzerain-Vassal treaty, which means a binding legal agreement between a king and his subject.  We learned about the similarities between that Code and the covenant between God and Abraham and later the Law of Moses.  Biblical "constitutions," I will use the Ten Commandments for example, usually present the most important rules and regulations first, and then start to hammer out the details. The first commandment recorded in Exodus and Deuteronomy as being given by God directly to Moses is: "have no other God's before me."  That rule is the king of all rules that follow, if any of the other rules should happen to conflict with that rule, they take a back seat.  Yahweh was really, really not a fan of idolatry.  Other rules follow, the nine other rules of the Ten Commandments but also 619 prohibitions found throughout Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy, and a bunch of prescriptions to go along with them.  But the Big Ten were the benchmarks. The law, even laws literally set in stone, are always in need of interpretation.  That's why the Hebrews have a tradition called Midrash, in which the texts of the Scripture are continually debated, questioned and interpreted.  That is why the actual Constitution can fit in your pocket, but there are legal libraries devoted to the implications of those laws.
Foundations are important when working with laws, and we generally work from the most sacred and important principles, outward into (mostly) less crucial matters of particularity. The Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA) has two sections, one is a Book of Confessions, which is a historical record of the Creeds of the Church, going back to the Apostle's Creed and the Nicene Creed (325 CE), and going forward to the Brief Statement of Faith (1983) and most recently the Belhar Confession.  We don't use the Creeds as a manual for our church government, we use them as principles and examples, we have a second part to the Constitution called the Form of Government that gives us the nitty gritty, Robert's Rules of Order business.  We start with the principle and move into the practice, we establish our ideal and then deal with reality.
The Constitution of the United States of America, also follow this principle in its Articles.  Article I describes the Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives, how they are selected, what they are responsible for and what limits they have put upon them.  Limits were super duper important to people who were essentially doing this because they were tired of all that Monarchist nonsense.  It is fairly clear that the Congress is supposed to be the real mover and shaker in this system. They have far and away the most stuff to do, but because they were working with a fairly new idea: democracy, it wasn't entirely clear how best to make this work.  If you think that all the folks at the Constitutional Conventions agreed on stuff, you need to examine your assumptions and read a book once in a while.  John Adams once referred to Thomas Paine's Common Sense as "a poor, ignorant, malicious, crapulous mass," and said that Thomas Jefferson's "soul was poisoned with ambition." So yeah, they didn't always play nice, and maybe the Trump is not such a new phenomenon.
But they did, except for the random closeted loyalist, agree that democracy was the way to go, but they did not inherently trust the masses of people to make smart choices (seems like remarkably prescient wisdom at the moment), so they put in safeguards against any one person or group of people getting too much power.  They sensed the danger of men like Napolean Bonaparte coming to power and engaging in megalomaniacal power grabs.  Many of them were Deists rather than actual Christians, but because they were still essentially steeped in the intellectual legacy of the Protestant Reformation they held a fairly firm grip on what human sin could do if left unchecked.  And so they checked it, by designing their system with strong brakes and built in redundancies.  Some of our frustration with our government is a product of design.  It is meant to move slow and have to clear obstacles of its own invention.  The men who put this together were not afraid of arguing, and noticed that spirited opposition tended to make the final outcome stronger.  If you want to get a law passed in those days, it had better be well thought out and airtight or else you were going to have men like Adams and Jefferson rip you to shreds.
Article II establishes the Presidency (Executive), because in the Congress was obviously going to be entirely too unwieldy to actually perform certain necessary functions.  In a world of kings and queens, who was going to represent us?  Also, if Congress did somehow go off the rails there needed to be some elected office that might be able to correct them.  The process for the election of the Executive was more complicated than for Congress, the requirements upon his character and person, more rigorous, however, it was seen that in military action and foreign affairs, we needed a person in charge.  The Executive power was rightly limited, and the process of impeachment defined should he be convicted of acts unbecoming his office: treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors.
But these two branches were not quite enough on their own.  Triads and triangles are really some of the most stable structures, so they added the Judiciary with Article III.  The Judiciary's job is to handle evaluation the laws through the process of legal argument and case law.  Their job is to act as the ultimate check and balance.  They are not elected, but appointed by the President, and they serve for life, or until they voluntarily step down. They function as a high court and a final word on matters relating to the Constitution. Their scope of operations is narrow and well defined, and they are not expected or permitted to go outside of it.
Articles IV deals with states rights, it is necessary to define the roles of individual state governments within the union.  Article V provides for the Constitution to be amended.  Article VI is the article that binds us together as a union of states that ratify the document, and Article VII is the actual ratification by representatives from the first thirteen states.
And there you have the thumbnail sketch of the Articles of the Constitution of the United States of America.  I have to say, it's such a sensible, well worked system, that you might think it could just stand all on its own.  But, well, not so much.  It was ratified on September 17th, 1787.  The first ten amendments, known as the Bill of Rights are going to come in barely four years later: December 15, 1791.