The genius of the Foundling
Fathers was in their design of a political system that involved checks and
balances.
Laws are set by
the legislature of both parties who try to work towards a solution that both
can agree on. It’s never been a perfect system, but it is all we we’ve got.
If the president
does not like their solution, the executive branch has veto power. If the legislature
does not agree with the president’s veto, they can override his veto
When the president of the United States uses a
presidential veto, it doesn't necessarily mean that the bill won't become a
law. The US Constitution gives Congress a means to sign a bill into law after a
presidential veto has occurred. In order to overturn a presidential veto, both
houses in Congress must vote to approve the bill by a two-thirds majority. In cases where a
majority votes does not occur, bipartisanship — the act of finding common
ground via compromise — can help override the veto by gaining a majority vote.
Other alternatives include declaring a law as unconstitutional or ruling
against same party affiliation.
On occasion, there
still may be disagreement about the laws that are passed, at which point courts
can get involved. Even then, though, the decisions that they arrive at are not
always the last word, which is why appeals are allowed.
FDR was one of our
greatest presidents, but he accomplished as much as he did by using executive
orders. During his terms in office, he issued 3728 executive orders.
After a while, his
opponents started to challenge some of those orders, which frustrated FDR. In
order to accomplish more of what he wanted to do; he considered expanding the
side of the Supreme Court
On February 5, 1937, President Franklin
D. Roosevelt shocked America by introducing a plan to expand the Supreme Court,
to gain favorable votes. FDR’s war on the court was short-lived, and it was
defeated by a crafty Chief Justice and Roosevelt’s party members.
By
1937, Roosevelt had won a second term in office, but the makeup of a
conservative-leaning Supreme Court hadn’t changed since he took office four
years earlier. There were four Justices –nicknamed the “Four Horsemen”: ,”
Justices George Sutherland, Pierce Butler, James McReynolds, and Willis Van
Devanter—who were conservative enough that their votes against most New Deal
plans were expected. A fifth justice with conservative leanings was the Chief
Justice, Charles Evans Hughes, who also narrowly lost the 1916 presidential
race to the Democratic incumbent, President Woodrow Wilson.
However, Hughes also had roots in the progressive wing of
the Republican party. Another justice, Owen Roberts, was a Hoover appointee who
also voted with the conservatives on some decisions including the significant Schechter Poultry v. United States case,
which struck down the National Industrial Recovery Act.
Adding to the tension between the president and the
Supreme Court were a series of decisions by the justices that halted key
components of the New Deal. After his re-election, Roosevelt developed his plan
to reform the court in secrecy, working with his attorney general, Homer
Cummings, on a way to ensure the court would rule favorably about
upcoming cases on Social Security and the National Labor Relations Act.
The plan was to pass a law—the Judicial Procedures
Reform Bill of 1937—that would allow the President to appoint an additional
justice for every sitting justice who was over 70 years of age, Roosevelt could
add six of his own justices to the court. With two liberals already on the
bench, that would put the odds in FDR’s favor.
Within five weeks of the President’s
announcement, the “court-packing plan,” as it came to be known, was heading
toward a dead-end in the Senate. By June 1937, the Judiciary Committee had sent
a report with a negative recommendation to the full Senate. “The bill is an
invasion of judicial power such as has never before been attempted in this
country. . . . It is essential to the continuance of our constitutional
democracy that the judiciary be completely independent of both the executive
and legislative branches of the government,” the report read.
Today, our system of checks and balances no longer works as well as it should.
Whatever name you
call it, Trump wants to rule as a dictator. In effect, he favors unitary rule.
Also known as a unitary government, a unitary state is a polity
structured to concentrate ultimate
governing power in the hands of a single national authority. It is the world’s most widely used
government system; the United Nations has 193 members, of which 165 have
unitary government structures. These states are usually centralized under a
strong national government, but some constitutional frameworks support
decentralized unitary structures. France offers a well-known example of a
centralized unitary state, while the Netherlands features a decentralized
style.
Federalism
is the opposite of unitary styles of government. In federalist systems,
internal political subdivisions like states and provinces retain extensive
political power and sole decision-making authority over certain matters of
governance. The United States, Canada, and Germany feature these structures,
which have certain advantages and certain drawbacks when compared against
unitary systems.
To date, Trump has ignored many court orders. In an analysis of 165 court
orders filed against the Trump administration, the Washington Post found that
it was accused of resisting court orders in at least 57 of those cases –
approximately 34 percent.
Since taking office, Trump has sought to implement his
agenda as swiftly as possible, particularly in cases involving his immigration policies and
attempts to drastically reduce the federal workforce.
Like FDR, Trump
has tried to bend the courts to his will. To do that, he was able to appoint 3
conservative judges to the Supreme court.
https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/p/september-12-2025-4f6
The results were
predictable.
Supporters of Trump
in state legislatures also tried to tip the scales to benefit Trump.
They tarred those who questioned the administration’s
economic or foreign policies as un-American—either socialists or traitors
making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks—and set out to make sure such
people could not have a voice at the polls. Republican gerrymandering and voter
suppression began to shut Democratic voices out of our government, aided by a
series of Supreme Court decisions. In 2010 the court opened the floodgates
of corporate money into our elections to sway voters; in 2013 it gutted the
1965 Voting Rights Act; in 2021 it said that election laws that affected
different groups of voters unevenly were not unconstitutional. In that year, a
former Republican president claimed he won the 2020 election because, all
evidence to the contrary, Democratic votes were fraudulent.
The reason that
Democrats are trying to pass an ethics code for the Supreme Court is that the court's increasing
use of the shadow docket.
Use of the shadow
docket for important rulings has increased precipitously since 2017. This
coincided with the first presidency of Donald Trump, when the Department of Justice sought emergency relief (generally to
stay lower court rulings against its executive actions) from the Supreme Court
at a far higher rate than had previous administrations, filing 41 emergency
applications over Trump's four years in office (by comparison, over the prior
16 years the Obama administration and
the Bush administration together
filed only eight emergency applications).
Rulings made by
way of the shadow docket during Trump's term included rulings over his travel ban, the diversion of military funds to the construction of the Mexico–United States border wall, the prohibition of
transgender people from openly serving in the United States military, use of the federal death penalty,nd restrictions on asylum seekers from Central America. The Supreme Court granted 28 of the Trump administration's
requests; in the 16 years prior, only four were granted.[22]
Following Trump's departure from office, the Court has made rulings against the Biden administration, putting an end to a federal eviction moratorium and nullifying the White House's attempt to end the Remain in Mexico policy. The latter was decided in an order two paragraphs long. In September 2021, the shadow docket gained more prominence after the Court declined to block the Texas Heartbeat Act from being enforced and decided some technical matters concerning how it could be challenged in Whole Woman's Health v. Jackson. In 2021, both the House Judiciary Committee and its Senate counterpart held its first hearings on the practice in February and September respectively.
Coinciding with
other attempts to reform the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats introduced
legislation in 2024 aiming to require the Court to provide written explanations
of its decision and disclose how the Justices voted.[
Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh says good judges are like good
referees.
“Am I calling it the same way for labor and management, for
the business and the environmental interests, for the Republican and the
Democrat?” he asked at a judicial conference over the summer. “If you
can’t look in the mirror and say, ‘I would do the exact same thing if the
parties were flipped,’ then you’re not being a good judge, just like you
wouldn’t be a good referee if you were favoring one team over the other.” A
look at the court’s record in emergency rulings does not appear to reflect
Justice Kavanaugh’s goal.
The link below compares the court’s ruling on Trump Versus
Biden.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/us/politics/supreme-court-emergency-docket-partisan.html
This is
apparent in the overall numbers, with the Trump administration prevailing much
more often than its predecessor had — 84 percent of the time, compared with 53
percent for the Biden administration. That is perhaps unsurprising, given that
the court is dominated by six Republican appointees.
Drilling down to individual justices’ votes rounds out the
group portrait.
In the 17 cases in which the Biden administration sought
emergency relief from the Supreme Court over four years, for instance, Justice
Kavanaugh voted in its favor 41 percent of the time, according to an analysis prepared for The New York Times
by Lee Epstein and Andrew D. Martin,
both of Washington University in St. Louis, and Michael J. Nelson of Penn State.
By contrast, in the 19 cases in which the court has ruled
on applications from the second Trump administration, Justice Kavanaugh voted
for the administration 89 percent of the time. That amounted to a 48
percentage-point gap in favor of President Trump.
The last piece of the checks and balance is Congress. However,
due to the fact that neither party has a strong majority, Congress can no longer
be a deterrent. For too many of the Republican party are afraid of Trump and
his base. As a result, they will not do anything to oppose him. That is
evidenced that they approved a number of his cabinet picks, many of whom are
unqualified. Pete Hegseth and Robert F Kennedy Jr. are the most obvious, but
there are others.
For now, our system of checks and balances is a cruel joke.
Over time, though, that will change.
Trump’s policies are extremely unpopular with the majority
of voters, and that is true of Trump himself.
The GOP is working hard to get redistricting in their favor,
a process that will ultimately fail.
My final message, though, it this.
Eventually, we’ll return to a more normal government.
Charlie Kirk’s assassination was a tragedy, but he was as responsible as
anyone for spreading hate and misinformation, and removing his voice from
public discourse will actually make our country safer.
