Via tonights Key Constitutional Concepts and Supreme Court Cases class, two ways the separation of powers now works differently than how the Framers anticipated: The Framers of the Constitution set up the three sections of government in order for them to keep checks and balances on each other in specific ways. Two changes since then have impacted how these checks and balances work: The first change was the 17th Amendment which took the election of senators away from the legislatures and gave it to the people of the states. People-elected senators generally dont care as much about the states interests per se as state-elected senators would. Today in congress, more weight is given to the people than to the states than what the Framers envisioned. The second change is the political party system, a system of government where elected officials belong to, and commonly vote with, a like-minded political bloc. The Framers idea behind the separation of government was that the different branches of government will see each other as rivals, e.g. congress will feel a sense of loyalty to congress, and the president will feel a sense of loyalty to the office of the presidency. However, in a government which is influenced by a political party system, a congress controlled by the same political party as the president is less likely to check or balance that president, and a congress controlled by the opposite party has an interest in going out of its way to make the president fail in order to win the next presidency. In this way, the political party system tends to give us too much or too little checking and balancing. How can we fix this? This is a problem that comes from political polarization, from thinking of politics as if it were a team sport rather than a shared attempt to promote the common good. So one thing we can do, probably the only thing we can do, is to stop thinking of politics in this way.
Posted on: Mon, 03 Nov 2014 22:19:49 +0000
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