Effective Checks on Corruption and Individual Power

2. Intractable Conflict Threat and Opportunity

One of the key benefits of democracy (in comparison to authoritarianism) is the checks it provides against corruption and individual power. In the United States and many other Western democracies we have a systems of "checks and balances," in which power is distributed between three branches of government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. At the federal level, this means the President and all the executive departments (State, Justice, Defense, etc.), the Congress (including the differently constituted House and Senate which check and balance each other), and the Supreme Court (and lower-level federal courts), which weigh the constitutionality of executive and legislative actions. So, in most respects, the court has the last word, and it can check the excesses of the President and his functionaries, as well as unjust laws passed by the legislature. And the President can try to check the legislature himself through his veto power, although the Congress can override a veto with a 2/3 vote of both houses.

This is the ideal, but it is an ideal that doesn't always work as well as intended. The President (with the advice and consent of the Senate) gets to appoint judges, and sometimes a President will get to appoint a disproportionate number of justices who are philosophically aligned with his particular partisan interests. (The courts are supposed to rule on the basis of law, not partisan wishes, but critics assert that they sometimes do not do that). Donald Trump got to appoint 3 Supreme Court justices during his first term which turned a relatively balanced court into a much more conservative court. He may well get to appoint another one or two justices during his second term, which will make the court firmly conservative for a very long time. (Supreme Court justices in the United States are appointed for life, so they cannot be replaced by future presidents unless one dies or resigns.) This, together with a "presidential immunity ruling" handed down in 2024 is seen by many observers to be a serious weakening of our system of checks and balances and the "rule of law," in the United States, allowing the President unchecked individual power. Others, however, see it as an appropriate check on "lawfare," the growing tendency of both parties to try to use laws and the justice system to discredit political opponents for frivolous charges.