Jim Walsh

Perhaps the most basic and fundamental idea of our democratic republic is the notion of “checks and balances.” That is, no one person, no one institution, has unchecked power.

To say, today, that our form of government is under threat is an understatement. The coming months and years may be the most important and consequential since the eras of Civil War or the Great Depression. And the lack of a Lincoln or an FDR is glaringly apparent.

In their hearts, the Founders distrusted the notion of political parties. Yet, early on, parties emerged. The Founders feared that if and when parties emerged, they would let their own limited interests, and the interests of their leaders, override the long term interests of the nation. Consequently, the Constitution they created holds that we don’t elect a king, a tsar or an emperor. We elect a President…and every time we do so, we also elect 435 members of Congress and about one third of the Senate. It is from those institutions that come the laws of the land, not from a palace, not from the White House.

In the mid-1930s, with the rise of Mussolini and Hitler and feeling the consequences of the Great Depression, the American writer, Sinclair Lewis, wrote the novel It Can’t Happen Here. The novel described the emergence of a dictator in the United States. The premis was that it could happen here. Those that sought to overthrow our democratic republic came from all over the country and, using the forms of democracy, took advantage of the chaos that a certain leader intentionally created. Fundamental to the idea of the novel was that a dictator might emerge but that resistance to that dictator would not cease. Written in 1935, it became a best seller in 2016. Amazon ran out of copies. In 2024, copies are available.

A wannabe dictator is about to enter the White House. He is not a figment of a novelist’s imagination. He is a figment of his own imagination. Is that an exaggeration? Would that it were. The campaign is over. He received a majority in the Electoral College. He will become the President. Now what?

That’s where “checks and balances come it.

The Founders anticipated that such an unfortunate thing could happen and created guardrails against it. Now we are seeing the concrete beginnings of Trump’s challenge to those guardrails.

For instance, our system requires that the President appoint his leadership team with “the advice and consent of the Senate” but Mr. Trump is insisting that he be allowed to get around that process using “recess appointments.”

The Attorney General, the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of Health and Human Services and others are given immense power over hundreds of thousands of employees and trillions of dollars. Yes, they are part of the Executive Branch and serve at the pleasure of the President, BUT, for good reason, they are given all that power only with “the advice and consent” of the Senate. And that process involves public hearings, public debate, and votes that can be seen, heard and remembered in the next election.

Mr. Trump does not like that process. He sees his appointees as underlings, as “apprentices,” to be fired at will, without checks, without balances, with only the power of his will in play.