When the Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution, they wanted to make sure that their new government would not have any of the problems that the colonial British government did. For example, they did not want there to be any person in the government who had complete power and could do whatever he wanted, like a king. They also did not want any part of the government to get so powerful that nobody could control it. Because of this, they split the government's power into three different branches. Each branch has ways of balancing out the power of another branch if it gets too powerful. This is called the system of checks and balances.