Checks & Balances

The whole art of government consists in the art of being honest. —Thomas Jefferson. Rights of British America, 1774. A government is forced to be honest if it operates under radical transparency. Every subterfuge dies at its very conception, because the would-be...

Our own political life is predicated on openness. We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free...

Liberty cannot be preserved without a general knowledge among the people, who have a right … an indisputable, indefeasible, divine right, to that most dreaded and envied kind of knowledge, I mean of the characters and conduct of their rulers. —John Adams. A...

No wise man, therefore, will in any instance of moment trust to the mere integrity of another. The experience of all ages may convince us, that men, when they are above fear, grow for the most part above honesty and shame. —John Trenchard. Cato’s Letters No. 61, How...

A single assembly is liable to all the vices, follies and frailties of an individual. Subject to fits of humour, starts of passion, flights of enthusiasm, partialities of prejudice, and consequently productive of hasty results and absurd judgments. —John Adams....

The way to have good and safe government, is not to trust it all to one, but to divide it among the many, distributing to every one exactly the functions he is competent to. Let the national government be entrusted with the defence of the nation, and its foreign and...

Everything that can be run more effectively by state and local government we shall turn over to state and local government, along with the funding sources to pay for it. We are going to put an end to the money merry-go-round, where our money becomes Washington’s...

There is more danger of oppression from a federal government than from a state government. This is because people can simply leave oppressive states. In this way, the state governments act as a check on each other. But if the federal government is oppressive, it is...

The state government should have constitutional powers to check local government, including the power to sack local mayors and revoke charters in the case of corruption or deficit spending. The power to check does not mean the power to override. Thus this principle...

In 1984 the Key West Police Department in Florida was declared a criminal enterprise under the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) legislation following an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. A jury later convicted ten members of...

The executive has the primary supervisory responsibility for the bureaucracy. Traditionally, the executive and bureaucracy have been considered a single branch; however, that analysis is no longer valid. Excessive government, excessive discretion, and improper...

The Saturday Night Massacre During the Watergate scandal, a special prosecutor, Archibald Cox, was appointed by President Nixon’s Attorney General. The special prosecutor insisted that the President comply with a subpoena to produce tape recordings of conversations in...

Judicial review The rule of law requires that the executive in its coercive action be bound by rules which prescribe not only when and where it may use coercion but also in what manner it may do so. The only way in which this can be ensured is to make all its actions...

Laws The legislature should be quick to straitjacket the executive with more detailed and prescriptive laws wherever arbitrary government activity is found to arise from the existing laws. Oversight committees The legislature should monitor the activities of the...

Personal misconduct The executive should operate an independent Board of Judicial Standards responsible for investigating complaints of judicial personal misconduct. The board should consist of sitting judges, retired judges, and lay members of good standing and...

The legislature should have the power to impeach judges for both personal misconduct (lack of integrity, dignity, independence, impartiality, or promptness) and jurisprudential waywardness (failure to apply binding precedent, legislation, or the constitution in...

The judicial branch exerts oversight over the legislature when it reviews legislation. This review must focus solely on whether a given law breaches the constitution. Some claim the courts should be empowered to strike down objectionable laws, even if they do not...

The Abscam scandal—a sting in which FBI agents posed as Middle Eastern businessmen seeking corrupt favors from lawmakers—resulted in the criminal conviction of seven congressmen. This was a case of the bureaucracy, without direction from the executive branch,...

The power of the executive to veto legislation is an important check on legislative power. The spectacle of one elected official countermanding a great body of elected officials may seem unbalanced, but it is a purely negative power, and little harm can come from laws...

When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistracy, there can be then no liberty … Again, there is no liberty, if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers. Were it joined...

Wherever there is interest and power to do wrong, wrong will generally be done. —James Madison. Letter to Thomas Jefferson, New York, October 17, 1788. A well devised constitution will recognize that every official has a natural tendency to exceed and abuse his...