Latest / The Fine Print of Democracy / Slow Government is Good Government
Transcript
- Jake: Slow Government is good government. Checks and Balances. The system that prevents unilateral power. Having fought a revolution against a powerful monarchy, the Founding Fathers were determined to create a government in which no person or institution could hold unchecked power. Their biggest question wasn't how do we make government more efficient? It was how do we prevent anyone from becoming too powerful again? first part of the answer to that question was our three branches of government: legislative, executive, and judicial. But it wasn't simply dividing the government. They then had to create a system where each branch could act independently and still restrain the power of the other branches. The problem wasn't necessarily one single king or monarch, the problem was concentrated power held in the hands of a few. They didn't just want to replace a king with a president, they wanted to fundamentally change the way leaders could wield power. They wanted to prevent any future individual or institution from accumulating too much authority. The founders didn't automatically assume that future leaders would always be virtuous and wise. Therefore, the Constitution assumes that people are imperfect. Leaders can be overly ambitious, partisan, power-hungry, or just simply bad at their jobs. They wanted a firm foundation of government that could withstand imperfect leaders rather than depend on perfect ones to keep the system intact. The founders didn't leave this philosophy to interpretation. They explained it directly during the ratification debate. James Madison wrote Federalist 51 in 1788, an essay titled The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments. Published after the end of the Constitutional Convention, but before the Constitution itself was ratified, Madison, along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay, hoped to convince the states to support and ratify the new Constitution. Madison's essay shows the Founding Fathers clearly intended the idea of checks and balances to be a key part of their new government. They understood the dangers of a single ruler and outlined the plan to combat the risk of falling into monarchy again. Even well meaning leaders can overstep. History is full of leaders who believed they were acting for the public good. One could argue President Franklin Roosevelt held an immense amount of mostly unchecked power during World War II and the Great Depression. Many of his actions were done with the desire to protect the citizens and the country he was tasked with leading, yet he didn't always have proper checks on his authority. The founders weren't just protecting against evil leaders, they were protecting against any leader gaining too much power. From the very beginning, the Constitution was built on a healthy skepticism of concentrated power. Each branch of government has its defined role, but each branch also relies on the other branches in order to successfully lead the country. Congress makes laws, but they can't unilaterally implement them. The president leads but can't unilaterally rule. The courts interpret laws, but they can't unilaterally enact laws. And the founders knew that any institution can become dangerous if left unchecked. With each branch essentially keeping a watchful eye over the other branches, checks and balances prevent any branch from drifting toward dominance. Authority is intentionally shared. Therefore, every important governmental action requires interaction between institutions. No branch is expected to blindly trust another. In fact, blindly trusting another branch can lead to one branch gaining unchecked power beyond what the founders intended. This constant interaction isn't accidental. It's the mechanism that keeps power accountable. Multiple perspectives improve decision making in all aspects of life, and that's no different in government. Each institution has a different role, meaning they are asking different questions. Congress debates whether the proposal is worth passing. The President considers whether it's the right approach to implement. The courts determine whether it complies with the Constitution. Think of it like revising an essay. One person checks the grammar, another checks the organization, and a third checks whether your argument actually makes sense. All facets of government must continually justify themselves, meaning leaders must persuade, negotiate, and defend their decisions. Consensus becomes a necessary part of the governing process. Delay isn't the objective, accountability is. This is especially true in an era with hyperpartisanship. If the president is a member of the Republican Party and Congress is led by Democrats, the two sides must work together. Nothing will get done otherwise. And while the gridlock we see can be frustrating, it's actually a feature, not a bug. Policies that come out of this process that survive the disagreements are often more stable and have broader appeal, not to mention the fact that this gridlock keeps any one institution from acting unilaterally and becoming too powerful. In the almost 250 years since the Constitution was written, political parties have changed. Technology has changed, the issues facing the country have changed, but human nature, human ambition has not. Every generation believes its challenges are uniquely urgent. Every administration believes its goals justify extraordinary action. Every Congress believes its priorities deserve immediate attention. And while there are certainly issues and challenges that need to be addressed every generation, checks and balances were designed to avoid rash decisions. The Constitution does not deny urgency. It simply says that urgency alone shouldn't remove constitutional limits. The more important a decision, the more scrutiny it deserves. For example, during the Korean War, President Truman attempted to seize privately owned steel mills in Ohio in an effort to prevent a strike that he feared would threaten the country's war effort. His justification for this was national security and urgency. The Supreme Court ruled that he lacked the constitutional authority to do so. Whether you think Truman was right or the Supreme Court was right is immaterial. The point is that no single branch had the final word by itself. During periods of relative political calm, checks and balances don't get much attention. They become visible when one branch tells another no, and that is exactly when they are doing their job. The moments when people complain about the system are often the moment it is functioning as it's designed. Decisions that survive constitutional scrutiny tend to carry greater legitimacy. When multiple institutions approve an action, it's more likely to be accepted as durable rather than temporary. This helps maintain confidence in government, even amid times of intense disagreement. The Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four is a great example of this durability. During the early 60s, civil rights was the issue of the time, and there is no single answer for how to move forward and solve the issue. Many proposals were made in Congress and debated over the years. Eventually a proposal was agreed upon by both houses of Congress and signed into law by President Johnson. Many lawsuits were brought before courts and its constitutionality was upheld time and time again. Because it gained support across multiple institutions, it became a lasting part of American law. The lesson isn't simply that it passed, the lesson is that policies that survive multiple constitutional hurdles tend to become more stable and legitimate than those imposed by the United By a single branch. Political majorities don't last forever. Today's majority might be tomorrow's minority. The rules you accept while you're in power are the same rules that will protect you when you're out of power. It is easy to support constitutional limits when they block policies you already oppose. It is much harder when those same limits block policies you support or want urgently passed. The most important part of this is not whether you agree or disagree with the outcome, it's whether you accept the process, even when it produces results you disagree with. This can be hard in an era of hyperpartisanship, but it is imperative that constitutional principles do not shift depending on who wins elections. The same constraints must apply regardless of party, ideology, urgency, or popularity. If constitutionality becomes flexible, it stops being meaningful at all. The strength of this system isn't that it always produces the fastest or easiest outcome, but that it makes sure no single moment of urgency overrides the structure meant to contain it. It forces decisions to go through limits even when those limits feel inconvenient in the moment. That is what gives those limits meaning. Because at its core, checks and balances aren't really about slowing government down or creating disagreement for disagreement's sake. They are about making sure power is never exercised in isolation. No branch, no leader, no moment of urgency gets to operate without being questioned. And that's the real test the system asks us. Not whether we support those limits when they're easy to accept, but whether we're willing to Willing to accept them when they aren't. And that is exactly what the Founding Fathers intended when the Constitution was written. They were not trying to build the most efficient form of government, they were trying to solve the problem of concentrated power. This concern shaped the entirety of the Constitution. The system of checks and balances goes beyond just President checks Congress, Congress checks president. It is a structural commitment that power is always divided, authority is always limited, and no single institution governs alone. The system has lasted not because the government has been perfect, but because it was designed with imperfection in mind. Every generation has tested the limits of the system in its own way, and the system has adapted without losing its core structure. The strength of the American government is not speed or unity, it is controlled friction between branches of power. Disagreement is not a flaw in the system, it is a built-in part of the system. And that is a point of checks and balances, not to remove disagreement from government, but to make sure no single institution ever has the final word on its own. Because in the American system of government, power is meant to be shared, challenged, and ultimately restrained. When you write about checks and balances, it's very easy to fall into the familiar civics class explanation. Congress makes laws, president enforces them, the courts interpret them, Congress checks the president, the president checks Congress, the court checks both. And that's all true, but it doesn't really explain why the Constitution was designed this way. And more importantly, it doesn't explain just how skeptical the people who wrote the Constitution were about concentrated power. And Federalist 51 is probably the best place to start. James Madison was one of the principal architects of the Constitution, and when he wrote Federalist F Federalist 51 in 1788, he was trying to explain why this new system of government would actually work. The Federalist Papers were, in part, an argument for why people should take a chance on this new government. And Madison's argument about human nature is remarkably blunt. He writes, quote, If men were angels, no government would be necessary, end quote. It's not exactly a ringing endorsement of humanity, but Madison isn't finished. He goes on to explain that even if we accept the need for government to control the people, we have another problem. The government itself has power. So, as Madison puts it, we have to quote oblige it to control itself. The Constitution isn't built on the assumption that the people running the government will always be wise, honest, selfless, or restrained. It assumes the opposite. Not necessarily that everyone is evil and not that every politician is secretly plotting to become a dictator, just that people are people. People have ambitions, people have ego. People want to accomplish things. People want to win, and people sometimes convince themselves that what they want is also what the country needs. Madison thought that was enough reason to build restraints into the system. This is where the line from Federalist 51 in the essay comes in. Quote, ambition must be made to counteract ambition, end quote. I think that sentence gets quoted so often that we sometimes miss how strange the idea actually is. Madison isn't saying that ambition is a problem we can eliminate. He's saying ambition can be useful. If you create a government and put three ambitious people in charge of three different branches, you could have a problem. Or you could have a solution. If the president wants more power, Congress has a reason to resist. If Congress tries to expand its authority, the president has a reason to resist. And if either branch violates the Constitution, the courts have a reason to intervene. The government is run by human beings, so the government needs human beings to check other human beings. George Washington is an interesting example of why that structure mattered. Washington voluntarily left the presidency after two terms, and that became enormously important to the development of the American presidency. But when the Constitution was written, nobody could know that Washington would do that. The founders could hope future presidents would be responsible, but they couldn't build the entire system around the assumption that every future president would behave like Washington. That's why the structure matters so much. Washington's character could be reassuring, but the Constitution had to be durable. And that gets us into another Federalist paper that helps clarify this. In Federalist 48, Madison argues that the branches cannot simply be separated and left completely alone. They have to be connected enough that each has a constitutional control over the others. That's the difference between separation of powers and checks and balances. Separation of powers means governmental power is divided among different institutions. Checks and balances means those institutions have ways to restrain one another. The Constitution tries to do both. Congress writes legislation, but the President can veto it. The President is Commander in Chief, but Congress has the constitutional power to declare war. The branches are separate, but they are also tangled together on purpose. Madison was very clear about why. He continues in Federalist 48 that power has a tendency to encroach on its assigned limits. That word, encroach, is an important word to pay attention to. Power doesn't necessarily have to be seized all at once. It can gradually expand. One exception becomes another exception, one emergency becomes another emergency, one president claims a little more authority than the last president, and eventually boundaries that looked obvious on paper become less obvious in practice. That's the kind of thing Madison was worried about. Alexander Hamilton, on the other hand, had a slightly different concern. In Federalist 70, he argued that the executive needed to be energetic. He believed a government that couldn't act decisively could fail to protect the country or enforce its laws. So here's the tension among people defending the Constitution. They wanted government to have enough power to actually govern, but they also wanted enough limits to prevent that power from becoming dangerous. You need an executive capable of acting, but you also need an executive who can be stopped. The Constitution is constantly trying to answer this question. How much power is enough? And then immediately asking, how do we make sure it doesn't become too much? That brings me back to something I said in the essay about the branches being less separate than we sometimes imagine. The branches are constantly interacting, and sometimes that interaction is incredibly frustrating. I get it, but that frustration is often the point. Take the Harry Truman Korean War example. During the war, the United States faced a serious national emergency. A nationwide steel strike threatened to interrupt steel production at a time when steel was essential to the war effort. Truman believed he needed to act, so he ordered the federal government to seize and operate the nation's steel mills. From Truman's perspective, this wasn't about personal power. He believed the country was facing a crisis, leading to one of the most important constitutional questions: what happens when a president believes that the emergency of the moment gives him authority that isn't clearly written into the Constitution? The Supreme Court case Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company v. Sawyer is important to answering that question. The court wasn't simply deciding whether Truman's policy was a good idea, the constitutional question was whether the president had the legal authority to take control of private steel mills. And the court said no. But the really interesting part of the case comes from Justice Robert Jackson's concurrence. Jackson developed a framework for thinking about presidential power that has become enormously influential. He basically divided presidential action into three categories. The first is when the president acts with authorization from Congress. In that situation, presidential power is at its strongest. The second is when Congress hasn't clearly authorized the presidents to act, but it also hasn't clearly told the president not to act. This is the messy middle, what Jackson described as a kind of zone of twilight. The third is when the president acts against the expressed or implied will of Congress. Jackson said that in this situation, presidential power is at its lowest ebb. That doesn't mean the president has no power, it means the president can't simply point to the the president-presidency itself as the source of unlimited authority. The Constitution divides power between Congress and the President, so if Congress has already acted in an area, the president has a much harder constitutional argument for ignoring that decision. That's exactly why the Youngstown case is such a good example of checks and balances. Truman thought there was an emergency. The Supreme Court did not have to decide whether the emergency was real, it had to decide whether the emergency gave Truman the constitutional authority he claimed. And the answer the court came to was no. The system doesn't necessarily say the president is wrong because the president's goal is bad. It says even if the goal is important, the government still has to operate within its constitutional authority. That's a much harder principle to follow. It's easy to believe in constitutional limits when someone is using government power to do something you oppose. It's much harder when you agree with the goal. Which brings me to the Civil Rights Act of nineteen sixty-four. I mentioned in the essay that the Civil Rights Act is an example of a policy that survived multiple constitutional hurdles, but there's an important part of the story worth diving deeper on. Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, President Lyndon Johnson signed it, and parts of the law were then challenged in court. One of the most important cases was Heart of Atlanta Motel v. United States. The Heart of Atlanta Motel was a business in Georgia that refused to rent rooms to black customers. The motel challenged Title II of the Civil Rights Act, arguing in part that Congress didn't have the constitutional authority to regulate its business in this way. The Supreme Court had to decide whether Congress's authority under the Commerce Clause extended to this situation. The Court upheld the law as applied to the motel, reasoning that the motel's business involved interstate travelers and therefore fell within Congress's power to regulate interstate commerce. That is checks and balances in action. Congress passed the law, the president signed it, and the courts still had the authority to decide whether Congress acted within the Constitution. It doesn't mean every branch gets an equal vote on every question. It means different institutions have different constitutional responsibilities. The Constitution doesn't really envision government as a relay race where one branch finishes its part and then hands the baton to the next. It's more like a conversation. Sometimes a very frustrating conversation. Sometimes the conversation ends with someone saying no. Which brings us back to gridlock. I think it's worth being careful here because there is a temptation to say that all gridlock must therefore be good. I don't think that's true. The Constitution was not designed to make government incapable of doing anything. Hamilton's argument in Federalist 70 is a useful reminder of that. There has to be a balance, though. Some disagreement is healthy, and some delay is healthy. But a system can also become dysfunctional with too much disagreement and delay. The difficult question is figuring out where that line is. What it comes down to is accountability is the goal. Sometimes accountability takes time, sometimes it requires compromise. Sometimes it requires one institution to tell another institution, no, you don't have the authority to do that. And sometimes that answer is incredibly frustrating. But that frustration Doesn't automatically mean the system is broken. In fact, sometimes the moment when the system feels most frustrating is the moment when you see this when you can see the system working most clearly. That's why I think the Truman example is so useful. If you're looking only at the immediate problem, you might say there's a war happening, the country needs steel, the president needs to act. Why are we letting constitutional technicalities get in the way? But this is very important. Constitutional limits are not technicalities. They're not technicalities, they're the rules that determine who gets to make the decisions. And emergencies don't disappear from history, the next president gets the precedent created by the previous president. The next Congress inherits the powers claimed by the previous Congress. The next generation inherits the interpretation established by the courts. Every extraordinary action can become part of the ordinary understanding of government power. That's why Madison's concern about gradual concentration of power matters so much. The danger isn't necessarily one dramatic moment when somebody announces that the Constitution no longer applies. It can be much quieter than that. It's the accumulation of exceptions. It's the argument that this situation is different, that this emergency is unique, that this goal is too important to wait. And maybe sometimes those things are true, but the constitutional question remains who gets to decide? And just as importantly, what prevents that person or institution from From becoming the final authority on its own power. That's the question the founders were trying to solve, and this is where George Washington comes back into the story. Washington's willingness to leave office is one of the great examples of Republican self-restraint in American history, maybe even world history. But the constitutional system could not depend on every president being George Washington. It couldn't depend on every Congress being reasonable, every judge being wise, or every political party caring more about constitutional structure than political victory. The system had to assume that eventually someone would test the limits, and someone did, then someone else did, and someone else did. The Constitution doesn't eliminate conflict over power, it creates places where that conflict can happen. The founders couldn't eliminate ambition, so Madison tried to harness it, use it for good. They couldn't guarantee that leaders would always be virtuous, so they created institutions capable of resisting one another. They couldn't guarantee that future generations would face the same problems they did, so they created the structure flexible enough To handle new problems without giving any one institution unlimited authority to solve them. And that brings us to the uncomfortable part. Checks and balances can only do so much by themselves. The Constitution can create a president who can be checked, a Congress that can be checked, and courts that can review government action, but the system still requires people to accept the idea of being checked, which is not always easy. It is very easy to support constitutional limits when they stop something you don't want. We already talked about that. If the president you dislike gets blocked by Congress, you might celebrate. If Congress passes a law you hate and the courts strike it down, you might celebrate. But what happens when the situation is reversed? What happens when the president you support gets blocked? What happens when Congress stops the legislation you desperately want? That is the real test. Not whether we believe in constitutional limits in theory, but whether we believe in them when they are inconvenient. Because the rules you accept when you are in power are the same rules that are supposed to protect you when you are not. Our system was designed around a pessimistic assumption power needs to be watched, even when the person holding it means well. Maybe especially when the person holding it means well, because the most dangerous argument for unlimited power isn't always I want more power. Sometimes it's I need more power because the situation is too important. I need to act because Congress is too slow, or I need to act because the courts don't understand the problem. I need to act because the country doesn't have time to wait. Sometimes those arguments are emotionally compelling. Sometimes they might even be partly true, but the Constitution asks a different question. Not simply is this necessary, but Is this constitutional? And if the answer is no, then the fact that something is difficult, urgent, popular, or even well intentioned doesn't automatically make it permissible. That's the genius and sometimes frustration of the system. The Constitution doesn't promise that the best idea will always win, it doesn't promise that government will move quickly, it doesn't even promise that political disagreements will disappear. What it tries to do is make sure that power is never completely alone. There should always be another institution capable of asking questions, another institution capable of saying no. Another constitutional limit that matters even when somebody wishes it didn't. And that's ultimately what Madison meant when he said that government has to be obliged to control itself. The system isn't strong because the people inside it are perfect, it's strong because it assumes they aren't. We don't need perfect leaders, as great as that would be. We need a system that can survive the imperfect ones.