checks and balances

System whereby each branch of an organization can limit the powers of the other branches, as in The union has used a system of checks and balances to prevent any large local from dominating its policies. This system was enacted through the Constitution of the United States in order to prevent any of its three branches from dominating the Federal government. The term is occasionally transferred to other mechanisms for balancing power.

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“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” explained James Madison when defining how the framers intended the U.S. Constitution to work. According to that reasoning, the Constitution divided the powers and responsibilities of the federal government among the legislative, executive, and judicial branches and also between the two houses of Congress. Each part of the government provides a check and balance on the ambition of the others, preventing any one part from becoming too powerful or autocratic.

For example, the President serves as commander in chief of the armed forces, but Congress appropriates the funds for the military and votes to declare war, and the Senate must ratify any peace treaties. The President nominates federal officials, but the Senate must confirm those nominations. The President may veto legislation, but Congress can override that veto by a two-thirds vote. The Supreme Court may declare acts of Congress unconstitutional, but new legislation can reverse Court decisions.

The use of judicial review is also the principal judicial check against the President. The Supreme Court and other federal courts may exercise this power to declare a Presidential action unconstitutional, as the Supreme Court did when President Harry Truman seized steel mills to ensure the production of steel for defense industries during the Korean War. The principal Presidential check on the judiciary is the appointment power, which can change the direction of the federal courts, as it did under Ronald Reagan and George Bush. To safeguard the justices against Presidential retribution, federal judges and Supreme Court justices of the United States serve on “good behavior” for life—unless they resign or commit a major offense—and cannot be removed except by the congressional impeachment process. A secondary Presidential check on the judiciary is the power to pardon people convicted of offenses against the United States.

Within Congress, both houses must pass a bill in the same form for it to become law, and both must cast a two-thirds vote to override a Presidential veto. The House alone initiates revenue bills; the Senate alone confirms nominations and treaties. The House votes to impeach federal officials, and then the Senate sits as a court to convict or acquit them.

Article 1, Section 8, of the Constitution gives Congress the power to pass laws dealing with the powers of the Presidency. The War Powers Act of 1973, for example, specifies conditions under which the President may use force in hostilities. The Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 permits the President to delay spending funds, subject to congressional approval.

“If men were angels”

The system of checks and balances requires Congress and the President to work together if they wish to accomplish anything. The system also creates friction among the branches, and it has sometimes appeared dangerously inefficient in times of national crisis. Yet the system has worked through war and peace, depression and prosperity, for more than two centuries. Checks and balances remain a reflection of the political realism of the framers of the Constitution.

“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers. “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty is this: You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”

See also Appointment power; Bicameral; Constitution, U.S.; Creation of the Presidency; Impeachment; Pardon power; Pocket veto; Removal power; Separation of powers; Steel seizure (1952); Treaty powers; Veto power

Sources

• Donald A. Ritchie, The U.S. Constitution (New York: Chelsea House, 1989)

The term "checks and balances" is often invoked when describing the virtues of the Constitution of the United States. It is an Enlightenment-era term, conceptually an outgrowth of the political theory of John Locke and other seventeenth-century political theorists and coined by philosophes sometime in the eighteenth century. By the time the U.S. Constitutional Convention met in 1787, it was a term and a concept known to the founders. To them it meant diffusing power in ways that would prevent any interest group, class, or region, singly or in combination, to subvert the republic of the United States.

James Madison described a republic as "a government which derives all its power … from the great power of the people." Checks and balances were indispensable, he said, because it was vital to keep access to the full authority of the government "from an inconsiderable proportion [of the people], or a favored class of it; otherwise a handful of tyrannical nobles, exercising their oppressions by a delegation of their powers, might claim for their government the honorable title of republic" without its substance. Thus, he cautioned, it was necessary to check vice with vice, interest with interest, power with power, to arrive at a balanced or "mixed" government.

The balanced government derived from the brilliant compromises the founders drafted. First and foremost, a tyrannical federal government would be checked by limiting its sovereignty, granting sovereignty as well to the individual states. A host of crucial compromises followed this key one: federal power balanced among legislative, executive, and judicial branches; federal executive authority, in the form of a president elected every four years and accorded a veto, but with legislative ability to override; direct election of a president, but filtered through an electoral college of state representatives; legislative power checked in class and democratic terms by an elite upper house (Senate) pitted against a popularly elected House of Representatives; and a distant but powerful national judiciary headed by the Supreme Court, always appointed to life terms and understood from its inception to possess the power of judicial review over both executive and legislative actions.

Together this combination of checks and balances was meant to sustain the republic at all times, even in periods of great national stress. No political group, economic or social class, or region possessed the access to power capable of dominating all others in this most successful of "mixed" governments—which is not to say that all of the compromises made by the founders were just in themselves, as in the case of explicitly recognizing the constitutionality of slavery in an effort to placate some mostly southern delegates.

The secret of the system of checks and balances lay in its inherent flexibility of interpretation over the generations and the ability of the Constitution to mold itself to the times even as it retained its inherent invincibility as the law of the land. By the late twentieth century some Americans feared that this flexibility was a grave weakness, encouraging permissiveness in the national courts and a penchant for aggrandized reform in both the executive and legislative branches. These critics, adhering to a doctrine of strict interpretation and a significant lessening of constitutional flexibility, have sought as a re-course to pin down the founders' "original intent" in order to render the U.S. Constitution less open to interpretation or adaptation over time.

Bibliography

Brant, Irving. James Madison. 6 vols. Volume 3: Father of the Constitution, 1787–1800. Indianapolis, Ind.: Bobbs-Merrill, 1950.

Fairfield, Roy, ed. The Federalist Papers. New York: 1981.

Jensen, Merrill, and Robert A. Becker, eds. The Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, 1788–1790. 4 vols. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976–1989.

—Carl E. Prince

A fundamental principle of American government, guaranteed by the Constitution, whereby each branch of the government (executive, judicial, and legislative) has some measure of influence over the other branches and may choose to block procedures of the other branches. Checks and balances prevent any one branch from accumulating too much power and encourage cooperation between branches as well as comprehensive debate on controversial policy issues. For example, to enact a federal law, the Senate and the House of Representatives must each vote to pass the law. In this sense, each house of Congress can check the other. Furthermore, even if the two houses do agree, the president must sign the law. If he chooses to veto the law, it can still be enacted if two-thirds of the members of both houses vote to override the veto. Under this arrangement, both Congress and the president can check each other. (See also appropriation, impeachment, judicial review, and separation of powers; also see chart, next page.)