Political Concepts
Checks and Balances
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Checks and balances is the constitutional design principle that no single branch of government should accumulate enough power to govern unchecked, achieved by giving each branch specific tools to limit the others. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, argued for separating legislative, executive and judicial power into three co-equal branches in his 1748 treatise The Spirit of the Laws, and the doctrine heavily shaped the framers of the United States Constitution of 1787, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton. Under the American arrangement, Congress writes law, declares war and can override a presidential veto; the President vetoes bills, appoints officials and commands the armed forces; and the courts interpret the law, a power the Supreme Court used in Marbury v. Madison in 1803 to establish judicial review, striking down an unconstitutional act of Congress for the first time even though no clause of the Constitution names the power explicitly.
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Origin YearSourced to the subject's own account Founding ContextFormulated as an explicit constitutional design principle by Montesquieu in his 1748 treatise The Spirit of the Laws, which argued for separating legislative, executive and judicial power into co-equal branches, and put into constitutional practice by the framers of the United States Constitution of 1787. 2 Learn More
Three Branches, No Referee
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Montesquieu did not trust virtue to keep power in check, so he built a system that did not need to. In The Spirit of the Laws, he argued that liberty survives only where legislative, executive and judicial power are held by three separate bodies, each strong enough to resist the other two but none strong enough to govern alone. There is no referee standing above the three branches in this design; the branches referee each other. The framers who wrote the United States Constitution in 1787, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton chief among them, built the American government directly on that premise. Congress writes the laws, declares war, and can override a presidential veto; the President can veto Congress's bills, appoints the officials who run the executive branch, and commands the armed forces; and the courts interpret what the other two have done, ready to say when either has gone beyond its own authority. No single branch answers only to itself, which was exactly Montesquieu's point: a government that checks itself does not need to be trusted to be safe.
The Power the Constitution Never Named
This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Nowhere does the United States Constitution say the Supreme Court may strike down a law Congress has passed. The framers seem to have expected the power would exist, but they left it unwritten, and it took until 1803 for the Court to claim it out loud. In Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice John Marshall's Court declared an act of Congress unconstitutional for the first time, reasoning that a written constitution is meaningless if an ordinary law can override it, and that saying what the law is, including whether a law is even valid, is the essence of judicial power. The ruling gave the judiciary a check the other two branches could not simply out-vote: neither Congress repealing the act nor the President enforcing it could undo a determination that the act had never been valid at all. Judicial review is now treated as one of the three pillars of the American system of checks and balances, alongside the veto and the override, even though the clause that supposedly grants it does not exist.
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