The Myth of Checks and Balances is Unmasked

By Stephen P. Pizzo

This month the curtain of the Constitutional Holy of Holies was pulled back. Therein was supposed to be the two supreme gods of our republic; Checks and Balances. Instead, it was empty. It’s all been an illusion that, for a couple of centuries, we all held on to in the naive belief that “it can’t happen here.”

But now it is happening, and we discover that, indeed, it can happen here after all. All that’s needed is a leader, and a party prepared to dig their heels in, no matter what.

Balance of powers? Forget about it.

Congress holds the purse strings and won’t approve billions in the budget for Trump’s wall. Game over? Not. Trump just grabs a billion here and billion there from the defense budget and goes on his merry way.

Checks against presidential abuses of power? Forget about it. Congress exerts its power to investigate administration misdeeds or abuses, but the administration refuses to provide documents or testimony. Congress issues subpoenas, the administration throws them in the trash.

Congress says it won’t stand for such an assault on its co-equal powers. But what to do? Where’s the congressional enforcement powers? Congress holds them in contempt. Their response, “So what.”

Congress threatens to have them arrested. But how? And who’s going to slap the cuffs on them?

No one, that’s who.

Well, then Congress will fine them, $25,000 a day, for noncompliance. Great. Who’s going to collect those fines? The Trump Department of Justice? No way. The courts? Not likely since Republicans have raced to stack the federal bench with like-minded judges. The Supreme Court? Once they would have. Now, not so much.

So why bother?

As Democrats ramp up their attempts to bring the lawless Trump administration to heel, all they have accomplished so far is to illustration just how weak the legislative branch has become when it found itself toe to toe with a genuine despot of a president.

That’s because for checks and balances to work you need people of good faith on both sides. People who really do put country above party, as the GOP did during Watergate. But this GOP has clearly vowed never to let that kind of thing happen to their party’s president again, no matter what he does.

And how weak our lauded Checks and Balances turned out to be. It turned out that our constitutional separation of powers could not withstand an assault from a gross, professional conman willing to brazenly snub his nose at the very idea of the rule of law.

So a constitutional fiction is unmasked. Welcome to the new America, one with checks and balances in name only. Like that fine old carving on the Statue of Liberty welcoming immigrants, checks and balances are now non-operative.

This isn’t just a constitutional crisis, it’s more than that. Much more than that. And it terrifies me.