As school kids people my age were taught about things like the separation of powers, checks and balances and co-equal branches of government. The three branches of the United States Federal government, Legislative, Executive and Judicial both work together and in tension, constantly pushing and pulling each other. The way the system is supposed to work is that the Legislative Brach, in other words the Congress, makes the law when approved by the House and Senate, the Executive branch can then either sign the bill into law or veto the bill and if signed into law the Executive implements and enforces the laws. The Judicial branch in the form of the Supreme Court acts as an arbiter of disputes that arise regarding laws and also in cases between the various states.
Were these branches intended to be equally important? Not really. The United States is a republic meaning that we the people vote for and elect representatives to act on our behalf. Those representatives would form the aptly named House of Representatives and be one half of the bicameral legislature with the Senate being the other. Initially Senators were chosen by the respective state legislature until the ratification in 1913 of the 17th Amendment which resulted in the two Senators for each state being directly elected by the people of that state. Few people realize this or that it is further evidence that the Founders did not intend for this nation to be a democracy despite all the wailing and gnashing of teeth over “our democracy” last election cycle.
The role of the President is more one of being an administrator. Congress makes laws, the President carries them out. The Congress declares war, the President directs the war effort. Congress passes laws, the President signs them but even if he doesn’t the Congress can override his veto. The biggest power the President has under the Constitution is the appointment of Supreme Court justices and other judges but even there he needs the “advice and consent” of the Senate.
The President is sort of the CEO of the United States and the Congress the Board of Directors. That isn’t an exact analogy of course but it helps to clarify the picture a bit. That would make the Supreme Court more like in-house legal counsel. As it is written the original Constitution does indeed have three branches of government but it certainly seems that they intended the Congress, the legislative branch, to be the most critical of these. This isn’t proof but it is telling. The first three Articles of the Constitution lay out the roles and responsibilities of the Legislative, Executive and Judicial Branches in that order.
The executive branch is given 1,015 words in Article II but around 2/3 of that is taken up with the manner of electing a President. The actual powers delegated in Article II mostly deal with being Commander-in-Chief, pardons, making treaties and filling post like Supreme Court justices and ambassadors. The presidential signing bills passed by Congress is covered in Article I.
The judicial branch covered in Article III warrants just 369 words.
The Legislative Branch? It is the first of the Articles and Article I of the Constitution takes up 2,246 words, 60% more than Article II and Article III combined. There is a lot of specific authority given to Congress, especially in Section 8 which covers everything from taxation to the currency to patents and the declaration of war. Article I is a laundry list of powers given to the Congress, most fairly vague and broad but clearly intended to secure the lawmaking process and public policy in the Legislative branch.
Which branch is given more words in the Constitution is an imperfect means of assigning importance but it sure appears that the authors of the Constitution invested a lot more time and effort into the function and power of Congress than they did the other two branches. The President gets a lot of attention because he is one man and that hearkens back to the idea of a king or monarch but under the Constitution his power was fairly limited and the courts even more so.
That was then.
Presidents have been regularly seeking to gather more power for most of our history and the Supreme Court has been functionally making laws for a long time, most notably in creating an extra-judicial “right” for people to engage in sodomy and miscegenation, for women to murder their unborn children and for homosexuals to “marry”. None of these have any basis in the Constitution and were made the inviolable law of the land by judicial fiat. This sidesteps the “checks and balances” in a dangerous way. When Congress passes a law it must first be signed off by the President and then it can be challenged at the Supreme Court. When the SCOTUS makes a new “right” like abortion on demand, there is no check on that power. The President can’t do anything about it. Congress could theoretically amend the Constitution to overturn this ruling but it is very difficult to ratify an amendment by design and that concept throws the entire process on it’s head. It shouldn’t be Congress that has to amend the Constitution to override the Supreme Court decision because the Supreme Court shouldn’t be making laws in the first place.
Where we find ourselves today is even worse.
The 119th Congress convened on January 3rd, 2025 or more than two months ago. During that time it has….well, it hasn’t really done anything. The Senate has approved Trump’s Cabinet nominees and they did agree to a “continuing resolution” to keep the current outrageous levels of spending in force and avoiding a “government shutdown”. There have been endless speeches and spectacles but little else. That isn’t all bad as most of the people in the Congress are midwits at best and outright morons at worst like AOC, Al Green, Maxine Waters, Jizzmine Crockett, Ilhan Omar…the list goes on and on and the number of certified idiots probably outweighs the garden variety midwit buffoons.
Meanwhile it has been the Trump & Elon versus random Federal judges show. Trump issues an executive order and some judge decides he can’t do that and a legal fight ensues. Musk looks into Executive branch agencies at the direction of the President who is the head of the Executive branch and some judge declares that the President can’t do that. Trump uses an existing, still valid law to deport illegal aliens who are members of a vicious South American gang and then some suspicious looking judge says the planes have to turn around in mid-air over international waters. Didn’t work out that way and this might be my favorite foreign leader tweet of the year.
That guy cracks me up and I will say this. Those tough guys didn’t look so tough when they were being hustled into vans to go into a black hole of a prison they will never get out of. I can’t blame them but that video will hopefully be a warning to other gangs: get arrested in the U.S. now and you don’t get a six month vacation in a U.S. prison, you might go to El Salvador and never come back.
We are in the midst of a major shake-up in how the Federal government operates and the pivotal part of that government, the legislative branch, is on the sidelines? They could have been sworn in, spent a couple of days in the Senate approving Trump’s nominees and then gone home.
All politics is fake and gay but in 2025 nothing is not only faker and gayer but also completely irrelevant quite like the United States Congress.
What are you talking about, Arthur?! We have FOUR branches of government, those being (in ascending order): Legislative, Executive, Judicial, and Israel, with the last one’s powers being defined as plenary by . . . wait a minute! You mean that last one wasn’t formally incorporated into the Constitution? Could’ve fooled me.
True enough that Congress is effectively worthless, and the judiciary has gotten out of control with overstepping their bounds. I don’t see any of it getting fixed, because most of the people holding these positions are morons, and don’t understand how it’s supposed to work to begin with.nits made worse by the face that more than 50% of our population can rightly be described as idiots, and many if them vote while also not understanding how the government is supposed to work per the Constitution. Since typical American primary and secondary education is garbage, there is no hope of either the masses of idiots or those they elect doing any better a job than they are now.
Representative government has repeatedly been shown to devolve into the sort of shit show we have now, with the result always being collapse and war. I consider it is probably inevitable that at some point countries that aren’t outright dictatorships will probably return to some form of monarchy, once they decide the experiment with “democracy” (My God how I’ve come to truly hate that word) has been an abject failure. Countries in Europe who have such dysfunctional “representative” governments (that are anything but representative) are only about a century removed from being run by Monarchs, so it will probably be easier for them to return to that again, assuming they don’t become Islamic caliphates first. What happens to the US is anyone’s guess. Probably nothing good, as in order to get any consensus, first a lot of incompatible people whose natural inclination is to fight with each other will have to either leave, or die. “Our” government will fail, because it is still set upon doing shit it shouldn’t and needn’t be doing, while ignoring and neglecting those matters for which it does have actual responsibility.
The 4th branch is the bureaucracy, and I’ve long maintained that the legislative branch has given up their powers to the bureaucracy and judicial, in that order. Mostly because the commies/progressives have looked at the system and determined that the best way to “game” the system is to use the judiciary in ways that were never meant to be constitutional, as well as having complete control over the bureaucracy. The president has been largely a figurehead who didn’t make any real difference unless it was to advance the progressive agenda (thanks Obama). Presidents with an “R” just didn’t make any real difference until Trump. And congress-critters by and large just do grandstanding and sound bites for the camera.
We haven’t been governed in a constitutional manner in decades.
Did you look at the judge who made that ruling? Look up his tribal affiliation.
don’t have to
already know
every single time isn’t just a meme.
“The President is sort of the CEO of the United States and the Congress the Board of Directors. That isn’t an exact analogy of course…” Actually, it is more accurate than most people know.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/what-if-america-you-pledge-allegiance-isnt-one-running-show
This link is just one example, and it has a lot more Links to additional information.
p.s. (((who))) ‘owns’ the corporation?, why the banksters who hold its Debt…
The president has more power than invisioned by the writers of the constitution. His power of executive orders only cover executive agencies. However, congress over the years have continued to create new agencies to control nearly all aspect of everyday life, thus giving the president the ability to create new rules and regulations in various agencies under the umbrella of the executive office.
The judicial also has more power than invisioned by the writers of the constitution. That is once again due to congress. They created the federal judicial system, supposedly to lessen the workload of the supreme court, or some other such nonsense.
Congress has been happy to cede power to the executive for a very long time. Primarily because they are bums, but also because in our fake gay and rigged regime, the president was (and still is, don’t be fooled) a wholly controlled puppet. But there’s been a schism among the puppet masters of late.
Congress is effective and participatory to the inverse of how much graft and corruption they are mired in. You get up to your ass in favors and sleaze and it makes it pretty tough to do anything straight line that might even be construed to resemble anything useful or beneficial. Congress is impotent, incompetent, mere moot rhetoric because they are bribed, blackmailed and threatened into the margins.
Congress does nothing because that would take away from party time.
The cycle of Republic to Oligarchy to Emperor is basically a story of how power eventually transfers from the legislative to the executive.
Those that don’t know history are doomed to repeat it.
Those that intend to repeat it make sure that people don’t know history.
Many (including me, some days) seem ready to embrace a set of non globohomo Zionist ruling elites. What keeps me up at night is wondering if that’s exactly the plan that was intended.
Us kids were home-schooled.
We learned about the TWO branches of government:
1) first and primary — Armed Citizens, then
2) supplemental and ancillary to the primary — bureaucrats such as judges, military, LawEnforcementOfficials, congress-critters and Presidents.
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An aside:
How many watched the podcast with that ex-FirstSpouse person and family?
How many clicked on it, immediately paused it, then went straight to the hilariously derisive comments?
https://youtu.be/5dS4WZfbM0Y?si=179CNrLB_q3Q6f8l
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The podcast addresses such burning issues as:
* can you eat ice cream and drink milk?
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An aside:
Does the brother look more like ‘Michelle’ than the ex-FirstSpouse person?