The principle of "checks and balances" is rooted in the Constitution's design of a national government with three distinct, coequal branches. It's been fundamental to American democracy for more than two centuries.
President Donald Trump is testing that system like rarely before, signing executive orders, closing or sharply reducing government agencies funded by Congress, and denigrating judges who ruled against him.
A person holds a copy of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence at a May 1 rally in New York.
"The framers were acutely aware of competing interests, and they had great distrust of concentrated authority," said Dartmouth College professor John Carey, an expert on American democracy. "That's where the idea came from."
That mostly prevented control from falling into "one person's hands," Carey said. Still, he warns that the system depends on "people operating in good faith聽鈥 and not necessarily exercising power to the fullest extent imaginable."
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Here's a look at previous tests.
An inscription from Marbury v. Madison, in which Chief Justice John Marshall (his statue in the foreground) established judicial review, is carved on the wall of the United States Supreme Court Building in Washington.
Appointments
President John Adams' made last-minute appointments before he left office in 1801. His successor, Thomas Jefferson, and Secretary of State James Madison ignored them. William Marbury, an Adams justice of the peace appointee, asked the Supreme Court to compel them to honor Adams' decisions.
Chief Justice John Marshall concluded in 1803 that the commissions were legitimate and Madison acted illegally by shelving them but stopped short of ordering anything. Marbury sued under a 1789 law that made the Supreme Court the trial court in the dispute. Marshall's opinion voided that law because it gave justices聽鈥 who almost exclusively hear appeals聽鈥 more power than the Constitution afforded them.
The split decision asserted the court's role in interpreting congressional acts聽鈥斅燼nd striking them down聽鈥 while adjudicating executive branch actions.
National banks
Andrew Jackson
Congress and President George Washington chartered the First Bank of the United States in 1791. Federalists favored a strong central government and wanted a national bank that could lend the government money. Anti-Federalists wanted less centralized power and argued Congress had no authority to charter a bank.
Andrew Jackson, the first populist president, loathed the bank, believing it to be a sop to the rich. Congress voted in 1832 to extend the charter. The president vetoed the measure, and Congress failed to muster the two-thirds majorities required by the Constitution to override him. In 1836, the Philadelphia-based bank became a private state bank.
War powers
Abraham Lincoln聽
During the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus, allowing federal authorities to arrest and hold people without granting them due process to challenge their detention. He said it might not be "strictly legal" but was a "public necessity" to protect the Union. The Supreme Court's Roger Taney, sitting as a circuit judge, declared the suspension illegal but noted he did not have the power to enforce the opinion.
Congress ultimately sided with Lincoln through retroactive statutes. The Supreme Court, in a 1862 case challenging other Lincoln actions, endorsed the president's argument that the office comes with inherent wartime powers not expressly allowed via the Constitution or Congress.
Reconstruction
Andrew Johnson
After the Civil War, "Radical Republicans" in Congress wanted penalties on states that seceded and on the Confederacy's leaders and combatants. They also advocated Reconstruction programs that enfranchised and elevated formerly enslaved men, establishing the Freedmen's Bureau to assist newly freed Black Americans.聽
President Andrew Johnson was more lenient on Confederates and harsher to formerly enslaved people. With pardon power, he repatriated former Confederates. He also limited Freedmen's Bureau authority to seize Confederates' assets.
Federal jobs
For a century, nearly all federal jobs were executive branch political appointments. In 1883, Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act. Changes started with some posts being filled through examinations rather than political favor. Congress developed the civil service system that Trump seeks to dismantle by reclassifying tens of thousands of government employees so they will be more easily dismissed from their jobs.
League of Nations
Henry Cabot Lodge
After World War I, the Treaty of Versailles called for an international body to bring countries together to discuss global affairs and prevent war.聽 The Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman, Republican Henry Cabot Lodge of Massachusetts, brought the treaty to the Senate in 1919 with amendments to limit the League of Nation's influence. President Woodrow Wilson opposed the caveats, and the Senate fell short of the two-thirds majority needed to ratify the treaty and join the League.
After World War II, the U.S. took a lead role, with Senate support, in establishing the United Nations and the NATO alliance.
New Deal
Franklin D. Roosevelt met the Great Depression with large federal programs and aggressive regulatory actions, much of it approved by Democratic majorities in Congress. A conservative Supreme Court struck down some New Deal legislation as beyond the scope of congressional power. Roosevelt answered by proposing to expand the nine-seat court and pressuring aging justices to retire. Critics dubbed it "a court-packing scheme."
President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers his first radio "Fireside Chat" on March 12, 1933, in Washington. After the four-term president's death, the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution imposed presidential term limits.聽
Term limits
Washington聽established an unwritten rule that a president serves no more than two terms. Roosevelt聽won third and fourth terms during WWII and, after his death, a bipartisan coalition pushed the 22nd Amendment that limits presidents to being elected twice.
President Richard Nixon poses for pictures Aug. 16, 1973,聽in his White House office after delivering a television address on Watergate.
Watergate
The Washington Post and other news media exposed ties between President Richard Nixon's associates and a break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel during the 1972 campaign. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously against Nixon in his assertion that executive privilege allowed him not to turn over potential evidence of his and top aides' roles in the cover-up. Nixon resigned after fellow Republicans told him Congress was poised to remove him from office.
Armed conflicts
Presidents from John F. Kennedy through Nixon ratcheted up U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia during the Cold War. But Congress never declared war in Vietnam. A 1973 deal ended official American military involvement but complete U.S. withdrawal didn't occur until more than two years later. Congress reduced funding for South Vietnam's democratic government and lawmakers refused to rubber-stamp larger administration requests, asserting a congressional check on the president's military and foreign policy agenda.
President Barack Obama is applauded after signing the Affordable Care Act into law March 23, 2010, in the East Room of the White House in Washington.
Affordable Care Act
A Democratic-controlled Congress overhauled the nation's health insurance system in 2010. The Affordable Care Act, in part, tried to require states to expand the Medicaid program that covers millions of children, disabled people and some low-income adults. The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that Congress and President Barack Obama could not compel states to expand the program by threatening to withhold other federal money already obligated to the states under previous federal law. The court upheld other portions of the law.
Trump vs. the courts: Presidential attacks open new front in long battle
Trump vs. the courts: Presidential attacks open new front in long battle
On March 15, three planes left the U.S., bound for a mega-prison in El Salvador. The Trump administration justified the deportation by saying most of the men on the planes were members of the Tren de Aragua (TdA) criminal gang.
Lawyers for some of the men say their clients were misidentified as gang members, in many cases, unrelated to TdA. In one case, a lawyer says the tattoo may have been for the popular Real Madrid soccer team.
None of the men had the opportunity to argue against the administration's assertion in court because they were deported under the Alien Enemies Act, which President Donald Trump had . The act gives the government the from hostile nations during wartime or an invasion, without due process.
The U.S. Venezuela or TdA, nor is the gang a country鈥攐ne of several reasons federal judge James Boasberg ordered the planes to turn around on March 15. Boasberg concluded that the administration to make the deportations.
Despite the order, the planes landed, and the men were taken into the custody of the Salvadoran prison, complete with by Trump . The episode set off a legal and political firestorm over whether the administration had , and what would come next if so.
"If anyone is being detained or removed based on the administration's assertion that it can do so without judicial review or due process," Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia, "the president is asserting dictatorial power and 'constitutional crisis' doesn't capture the gravity of the situation."
There are about 1,700 federal judges in the U.S., and all are appointed by presidents and confirmed by the U.S. Senate鈥攏ot elected, explains. Trump and his allies have argued that it is, in effect, judge, from any district, can overrule the will of the president on a national level.
Skepticism of the federal courts on these grounds is or conservative preoccupation: In the aftermath of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, the 2022 Supreme Court decision that struck down Roe v. Wade, prominent Democrats also . A few even for .
More broadly, presidents have long jockeyed with the courts over power. Franklin D. Roosevelt's to up to 15 justices to add members sympathetic to his New Deal programs is just one memorable example.
However, Trump's attacks on the judiciary are unprecedented in some ways, especially the extent to which they've been directed at individual judges.
Trump has called Boasberg鈥攚ho was 鈥"a radical left lunatic" and called for his impeachment. Almost immediately, some Republican House members against Boasberg. The effort is unlikely to go far, as it would to convict. Still, some experts see it as an escalation in Trump's . To date, no federal judge "because of dissatisfaction with his or her rulings," a former judge told NPR.
The personalized and agitated tenor around judges has . That was true over the deportation flights.
Congressional Republicans are pursuing legislation that would altogether. On Thursday, Trump also called for the Supreme Court to issue national injunctions.
If either came to fruition, it would massively untether the administration from judicial checks. According to The Washington Post, there are where a federal judge paused or reversed a Trump administration policy. That means about once every four days since Trump's inauguration, that the administration likely broke the law.
Trump officials have , and on March 19 "border czar" Tom Homan said that he will before using it for more deportation flights. But at the same time, Boasberg has ruled that administration lawyers about the deportations or gave "woefully insufficient" answers.
If the Trump administration were to simply begin ignoring the courts, it's unclear what could be done to stop it. 鈥攁n agency under the Department of Justice. As Vox's Ian Millhiser wrote this week: Trump could simply tell the U.S. attorney general to instruct marshals not to enforce court orders against his administration.
While Congress could impeach Trump if he blatantly ignores the law, that outcome is unlikely for the same partisan reasons that will probably save Boasberg from removal.
Still, some argue that the point isn't necessarily defiance鈥攊t may be just as much about the spectacle of defiance and punishment. In a post this week, historian Timothy Snyder more for public consumption than to achieve any discrete immigration enforcement goal.
"They are deliberately associating the law itself with people, the deportees, who they expect to be unpopular," Snyder wrote. "In this way they hope to get popular opinion on their side as they ignore a court order. But if they succeed in making an exception once, it becomes the rule."
was produced by聽, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
