#checks-and-balances

#checks-and-balances

President Donald Trump may be stretching executive power to its outermost bounds, but in one very significant area he is simply not getting his way: criminal prosecutions. In many cases-such as those of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, charges against whom were thrown out by a federal judge in Virginia today-the basic, ground-level machinery of the criminal-justice system has thwarted the administration.

President Donald Trump has spent the first nine months of his term bulldozing limits on his power, abetted by a supine Congress. What might be left of checks and balances after four years of unified Republican control in Washington is unclear. Trump sees winning a majority in the midterms as crucial to his agenda, and he is also worried about them, as demonstrated by his cajoling and badgering of GOP-led states to gerrymander House districts to aid Republican candidates.

But so many of the basic tenets we used to take as settled just aren't anymore. Remember checks and balances? There was a time when we assumed that no one branch of the federal government could dominate the other two to such an extent as to render precedent irrelevant. Yet, here we are. I'd have a hard time teaching checks and balances with a straight face now.

The US supreme court allowing the president effectively to abolish the Department of Education only reinforces this sense; Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, explicitly wrote that the threat to our Constitution's separation of powers is grave.