16 As Manin states the separation of powers "aimed to place restraints on what the Federalists expected to be the predominant power, the power of the people. (…) The primary purpose of these two prominent checks and balances was thus to slow down the will of the people and to delay its action. These checks were not supposed to operate as bulwarks that stopped definitively the popular will, but only as obstacles which could be overcome, but after a while". Bernard Manin: "Checks, Balances and Boundaries: the Separation of Powers in the Constitutional Debate of 1787". In: Biancamaria Fontana (org.). The Invention of the Modern Republic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, pp. 60-61.
