How Do the Three Branches of the U.S. Government Work (Or Not Work) Together?

America's founders created the three branches of the government -- executive, legislative, and judicial -- to check and balance each other. Learn how the system struggles and works in this episode of BrainStuff, based on this article: https://people.howstuffworks.com/three-branches-government.htm

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Brainstuff, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey Brainstuff, Lauren Vogelbaum. Here.
If you're a person who is not a hardcore political junkie,
you may find yourself bewildered by how the three main
parts of the US government continually seem to be butting
heads instead of working together on solutions to the nation's problems.

(00:26):
But the government was structured in three parts for reasons.
The three branches are the executive branch, which includes the president,
their cabinet, and the agencies that they control. The legislative branch,
consisting of the two houses of Congress, which are the
House of Representatives and the Senate, and the judicial branch,
which includes the Supreme Court and all of the nation's

(00:48):
federal and state courts. In the abstract, here's how the
system sort of works. The President might press Congress to
pass legislation non sum issue that he made a campaign
promise to when act. After lots of arguing and finagling,
the legislators pass a bill, which sometimes turns out to

(01:09):
be very different from what the president asked for. If
he doesn't veto the bill, he may issue a signing
statement that spells out how the federal agencies that he
controls are going to enforce the law in a different
way than Congress intended. Then other executive branch employees draw
up regulations for how to enforce the law, and it

(01:29):
takes effect. Congressional committees may hold hearings to scrutinize what
the executive branch is doing, and to top it all off,
the US Supreme Court might step in and smack down
both the President and Congress by ruling that some part
of the law is unconstitutional, forcing them to essentially start over.

(01:50):
As wild as it may seem, that's how the nation's
founders actually intended the system to work, because they didn't
want any one part of the government to have too
much power. To that end, they filled the US Constitution
with checks and balances that each branch could impose upon
the others. The idea was that those three branches eventually

(02:12):
would hammer out compromises that everyone could live with. Of course,
the idea of having three branches of a government check
each other isn't an American invention. The founders, including James Madison,
the future president who was the lead author of the
US Constitution, were influenced by ideas all the way from antiquity,

(02:32):
like Aristotle's politics all the way through John Locke, the
late seventeenth century British philosopher, But the most prominent influence
may have been French philosopher Baron de Montenescu, author of
the seventeen forty eight treatise The Spirit of the Laws,
who described what should distinguish a self governing republic from

(02:53):
monarchies and despotic countries. The republican government, he believed, needed
to have and independent executive, legislative, and judicial branches in
order to prevent one another from abusing their various powers.
But the system devised by the founders, which is described
in Articles one, two, and three of the US Constitution,

(03:17):
wasn't quite as cotton dried as Montenescue's. Instead, they allowed
some overlap for the article. This episode is based on
How Stuffworks. Spoke via email back in twenty twenty with
Nicholas Mosvik, who at the time was a senior fellow
at the National Constitution Center, a museum and civil education

(03:37):
organization in Philadelphia. He said the easiest examples are in
the Senate and Article two. The Senate clearly holds executive
functions as they perform a role in advice and consent
for treaties, the appointment of judges and executive officers. The
president holds a veto power, which gives an a role

(03:58):
in legislation and the power to give advice to Congress,
but typically in the form of a state of the
Union and recommendations on legislation. To make things more complicated,
some of the president's powers aren't precisely spelled out in
the Constitution. For example, both executive orders and signing statements

(04:19):
are more modern inventions derived from implied language in the Constitution.
The concept of how the three branches work together or
against each other has indeed evolved over the centuries as
new circumstances have presented new situations. For example, during the
nineteen thirties, all three branches of government were involved in

(04:40):
creating and delineating the boundaries of a number of administrative
bodies surrounding industrialization, the First World War, the Great Depression,
and the New Deal. There's a concept called the non
delegation doctrine that states that a branch of the government
can't delegate its powers to another group. But during that

(05:01):
time in the nineteen thirties, the government created a number
of national agencies, like the Food and Drug Administration and
the Securities and Exchange Commission to help monitor and regulate
the developing realities of our society. Amosfik said the Supreme
Court was heavily involved in the nineteen thirties in determining
the boundaries of what we call delegation, the granting of

(05:24):
one branch's powers to an independent body or as part
of the executive branch. Some delegations were initially struck down
under the non delegation doctrine. Scholars debate whether or not
the non delegation doctrine flows from the understanding of the founders,
but the idea is simply that Congress cannot delegate its
core power from the vesting clause to make all laws

(05:45):
to another body, any more than it can grant non
Article three courts, Article three powers or jurisdiction. This, too,
is where recent questions about removal of directors of administrative
agencies by the President comes from. It too, is a
separation of powers question, but one that flows from modern
innovations that the founders could not entirely envision. However, the

(06:11):
checks and balances baked into the three branch system have
prevented abuses of power in modern situations. Houstuff Works also
spoke via email with Bruce Peabody, a professor of government
in politics at Fairleigh Dickinson University. He said one of
the classic examples is the push and pull associated with

(06:31):
the congressional investigation into the Nixon campaign's trespass and bugging
of the Watergate building and the Democratic National Committee's headquarters.
Congress rightfully investigated the president pushed back, claiming that the
White House recordings which implicated the president were covered under
the legal protection of executive privilege, and the Supreme Court
helped navigate the dispute, ultimately ruling that the president did

(06:55):
have the unwritten constitutional power of the executive privilege, but
noting that it was not an unlimited power, and setting
out some of the rules for its use. In the
process of this dramatic example of checks and balances, each
branch arguably served its own political and institutional interests as
well as the nations, but the three branch system isn't

(07:20):
some machine that can just run on autopilot. In order
for the democracy to work, the people in the three
branches need to have personal qualities that go beyond the
architecture of the system. In recent years, we've seen the
system become less effective in working out conflicts and taking
effective action. The increasingly acrimonious stalemate over the nation's immigration

(07:42):
policy is a prime example. Peabody said, I would probably
attribute our logjam and chronic inaction most directly to hyperactive partisanship.
But yes, this development is tied up with a decline
in our belief in Republican virtue, a somewhat old fashioned
idea that our leaders should be expected to act for

(08:03):
the public good a not just personal interest, and that
they should achieve honor while serving in government. Political science
scholars have identified basic norms that are necessary for enabling
our government to function. One of those key principles, Peabody explains,
is mutual toleration. The idea of accepting your political opponents

(08:24):
is legitimate even if you've eminently disagree with them. The
keyword here is mutual, as all parties must act in
good faith in order for the system to work. Another
important ingredient is forbearance, which basically means that you self
impose limits on how far you'll go in using your
powers of government to advance your interests and those of

(08:44):
the political party to which you belong. Even outside of
our current circumstances, America's three branch system is highly susceptible
to developing imbalances, in part because the founders chose to
create a strong chief executive in the president. That leader
has brought authority and can't easily be removed from power

(09:06):
before their four years are up. In the UK, by contrast,
political conflict can lead to Parliament calling an early election
that can lead to the Prime Minister being kicked out
of power. To exacerbate this problem, over the years, we've
seen a gradual expansion of presidential power. Peabody said that
the US government has become increasingly president centric for a

(09:29):
variety of reasons, from changes in our media environment and
political campaigns that focus on candidates rather than ideas, to
the growth of what sometimes called the administrative state, that is,
the vast and permanent bureaucracy of executive branch agencies. Peaboddy
said this, combined with both parties post FDR success in

(09:51):
placing their candidates in the White House and the close
competitiveness of many presidential races, have made both Democrats and
Republicans complicit an increasing executive power. Both the Trump and
Obama administrations illustrate that we look to our chief executive
to solve problems and wheeled authority when Congress isn't able
to cooperate, lead, or assert itself. Taking immigration as an example,

(10:17):
after years of infighting in Congress, a President Obama in
twenty fourteen decided to issue an executive order deferring the
deportation of so called dreamers, meaning children who entered the
US illegally with their parents and grew up here. The
program is called the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrival or DACA.

(10:38):
The constitutionality of Obama's executive order was challenged, but ultimately
upheld in a narrow five to four decision by the
US Supreme Court in June of twenty twenty. In the meanwhile,
Obama tried to expand DAKA, but then the Trump administration
canceled the expansion and tried to dismantle DACA altogether. Then
President Biden administered another executive order reinstating it. That order

(11:03):
has also been challenged and is now making its way
back up through the courts. But even so, the three
branch system has an amazing amount of resilience. The Constitution
still enables Congress and the courts to push back against
presidential power and vice versa. Congress has a lot of
what's called power of the purse, a meaning they can

(11:25):
direct or redirect policy through funding and when. In twenty
twenty four, the Supreme Court ruled the presidents have immunity
from crimes they commit during official actions. The Biden administration
called for a constitutional amendment preventing that immunity and suggested
term limits for Supreme Court justices. The system is certainly

(11:48):
strained in these our hyperpartisan times, but it seems to
still be plodding along. We hear it. Brainstuff encourage you
to do your part. Educate yourself on local issues and elections,
and vote in those between term times. Local and state
appointments can have a huge impact on our lives and

(12:09):
on policies going all the way up to national issues.
Today's episode is based on the article what are the
three branches of US Government and how do they work together?
On how Stuffworks dot Com? Written by Patrick J. Kaiger.
Brainstuff is production of iHeartRadio in partnership with how Stuffworks
dot Com and is produced by Tyler Klang. Four more

(12:31):
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