Checks and Balances: How Our Government Maintains Equilibrium

The architecture of American democracy didn't happen by accident. In this illuminating episode of Civics in a Year, Dr. Sean Beienberg reveals how the Constitution's system of checks and balances creates a government resistant to tyranny yet capable of action.

Starting with the fundamental concept of separation of powers—where different branches handle lawmaking, execution, and adjudication—Dr. Beienberg explains how the founders went further by giving each branch "defensive interventions" into the others' domains. The presidential veto allows blocking legislation without creating it. Congressional impeachment provides recourse against corrupt officials. Judicial review enables courts to invalidate unconstitutional actions. These mechanisms ensure no single branch can dominate the others.

What makes this system remarkable is its redundancy. As Dr. Beienberg notes, "Winning one election doesn't mean you can wreck the whole system." Unlike Britain's parliamentary model, where power concentrates between elections, America requires sustained control across multiple institutions to enact fundamental change. This sometimes frustrating feature reflects the founders' priority: preventing tyranny even at the cost of occasional gridlock.

Perhaps most importantly, we learn that these constitutional guardrails, while ingeniously designed, ultimately depend on citizens themselves. Madison warned that if people "systematically and continuously don't want to enforce these checks," no constitutional design can save democracy. The system works because enough Americans, across generations, have valued the restraint of power over its concentration.

Have you considered how these constitutional checks affect issues you care about? Subscribe to Civics in a Year to continue exploring the brilliant mechanisms that have sustained American democracy for over two centuries.

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Chapters

• 1:32 Introduction to Checks and Balances
• 2:40 Separation of Powers Explained
• 3:55 Checks Between Branches
• 6:41 Constitutional vs. Informal Checks
• 9:03 The People as Ultimate Backstop
• 9:53 American vs. British Governance

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:46

Welcome to Civics in a Year. Today we are going to be talking about the Constitution and the system of checks and balances. We have Dr Sean Beinberg back with us. Dr Bein about that extensively in the Federalist 47-48 pairing of podcasts.

Speaker 2: 0:59

But the idea is that the separation of powers is basically jurisdiction given to the different parts of the government, both the state and the federal governments.

Speaker 2: 1:25

They get different jurisdiction and that particularly we generally tend to use the phrase separation of powers in reference to the division horizontally between the legislature having the lawmaking authority, the executive having the law executing authority and the judiciary having the adjudicatory authority. So that just means separation of powers in that sense just means that no branch can do basically another part's job. Branch can do basically another part's job. Checks and balances is the flip side of that, which is the branches are given a little bit of a bite of each other's power in the sense of being able to block but not to do so. What I mean by that is that, for example, the Constitution vests a veto power in the executive branch. Veto is basically an intervention in the lawmaking process which we think of as the quintessential role of the legislature the state legislatures at the states and Congress at the federal level. But a veto is the executive intervening and saying no, we think this part of lawmaking is either unconstitutional or imprudent, so you can't do this. That doesn't mean that the executive can make law, but it means the executive can block law and there are several instances of that in the United States Constitution and parallel at the state constitutions, which in many ways, as we've talked about, the US Constitution draws from particularly Massachusetts. This idea of checks working against each other very much comes out of like the thought of John Adams and others at the time of the founding. So we see the veto power in the lawmaking process, we see impeachment which Congress can wield against executive or the judges. Now they decide very quickly, for good reasons, that this ought to not be exercised for just sort of doing your job, but not necessarily the most doing your job differently than how Congress wants you to do it or the legislature state legislature wants you to do it. They quickly conclude that that is not grounds for impeachment, that impeachment should be reserved, if not necessarily, for criminal acts. Misdemeanors also include sort of corrupt malfeasance that might not be explicitly criminal, but basically here's a check for the other two branches acting criminally or inappropriately. So that's a check that the Congress wields.

Speaker 2: 3:44

Congress also has control over the power of the purse, so they can defund things. They have a power over the courts. That is not appreciated. They have the authority to strip jurisdiction, so if they think the courts are interfering in places that they ought not to be. They can basically say the court is no longer going to hear cases about X topic.

Speaker 2: 4:07

There are reasons why, sort of in the logic of the Constitution, we have been, and candidly should remain, hesitant to do that, that we want an independent judiciary.

Speaker 2: 4:18

But the idea is that creates a way for Congress to potentially stop the worst things that the judiciary might do without them, like firing them and making them starve to death or something like that, which they all recognize is a real problem under the British in the British constitutional history and tradition.

Speaker 2: 4:34

So that's a check that exists against the judiciary.

Speaker 2: 4:38

The judiciary, very famously, obviously has the authority of judicial review to declare things that are done by Congress or the executive branch, as well as the states, as inconsistent with the Constitution, so they can block that, and so the idea is that each of these branches has ways in which they can not do things that the other one does, but stop one of the other branches from doing something that is illegitimate, and so this creates I'm not as much of a Federalist 51 fan as some people, but it is right in the sense that it reinforces this idea of overlapping redundant checks.

Speaker 2: 5:19

You have these multiple ways in which the Constitution's mandates but you have these multiple ways in which the Constitution's mandates, constitution structures, can be sort of institutionally implemented, not just simply sort of a list of Congress you shall do this and you shall not do that. But there are actual institutional mechanisms that each of the branches has to police its own turf and to police other branches from getting on their turf, defending their own turf in effect. So the checks and balances are sort of defensive interventions into the powers of the other parts of the government.

Speaker 1: 5:55

And all of these checks and balances are explicitly written in the Constitution, correct Like this isn't something that somebody just made up somewhere. We can actually open the text of Articles 1, 2, and 3 and see these in there.

Speaker 2: 6:10

There are sort of additional informal ones that are not in the text of the Constitution. So, potentially, whether the you know whether the executive will enforce a law and Matt Hamilton alludes to this in Federalist 78, right that the judiciary doesn't have its own army so that one's sort of an informal check potentially. That's a very, very complicated thing about whether the president, when the president has the authority not to execute a law. That's, I think, one of the most complicated issues in constitutional law. Yeah, whether the president can. Basically no one thinks the president can just refuse to enforce a law that he or she thinks is imprudent. But whether the president can refuse to enforce a law that he or she thinks is unconstitutional, that's potentially a check on the judiciary. But the other ones that I was mentioning the veto is very, very specifically and in great detail spelled out, even what the override processes are, judicial review in one one sense, according to some pedantic people, is not in the text of the Constitution. I think that the sort of understanding of the judicial power that existed at the time, that all the ratifying conventions, so I think that one is explicit enough, but others may dispute that claim. But things like the veto, things like impeachment. Yeah, these are all in the Constitution and articulated at the time as reasons not to be concerned that this government would grow tyrannical because there were so many redundant checks that were created on it On top of, as Madison and others go back to, it is still fundamentally a Republican form of government, which is to say that, other than the courts, every one of these branches, every one of these parts of the government is either directly electable or you elect the people, who then elect them with an indirect election, so that the people serve ultimately as the backstop.

Speaker 2: 8:02

And this is a warning that Madison offers in a couple of the Federalist Papers, which is like look, at the end of the day, if the people just systematically and continuously don't want to enforce these checks, then you know, not even the world's best system could do that. But he basically argues and I think has a good reason to argue that to say we've done a pretty good job of writing an awful lot of redundant checks to make that. So that just you know, winning one election doesn't mean you can wreck the whole system. Like you have to have sustained, repeated support for branches basically exceeding their brief, which is ratified by elections. Yeah, at that point the system could break, but at that point sort of you've done it yourselves rather than someone has sort of sneaked through and screwed it over. So I think Madison is right to say they put quite a few checks in here and in this. It's quite different than, say, the modern British model In the British model today, because the executive, nominally the monarch, has basically fallen out of actual governing power.

Speaker 2: 9:07

The executive branch of the prime minister is within the parliament and so there is no real meaningful separation of powers in the United Kingdom anymore. Parliament is effectively I'm being a little glib but parliament effectively has total authority to govern within five years between the elections and there are no basically meaningful checks on it because they can always just pass another bill to override even if the courts try to stop them on something, because they can always just pass another bill to override even if the courts try to stop them on something. So that is something that I think the American people have reason to be proud of, that this system does create sometimes frustrating checks, but does create a system that makes it quite difficult.

Speaker 2: 9:39

There has to be a lot of institutions that are captured, not just simply one in order to implement the sort of tyrannical or overbearing fears that the generation debating the Constitution were worried about, as were the architects of the Constitution. They themselves had these concerns.

Speaker 1: 9:58

Fantastic. Thank you so much for going through checks and balances with us and giving us a little bit of that history. We appreciate it.