Separation of powers is a doctrine of constitutional law under which the three branches of government (executive, legislative, and judicial) are kept separate … also known as the system of checks and balances, because each branch is given certain powers so as to check and balance the other branches.
Each branch has separate powers, and generally each branch is not allowed to exercise the powers of the other branches.
The Legislative Branch exercises congressional power, the Executive Branch exercises executive power, and the Judicial Branch exercises judicial review.
Cornell University Legal Information Institute
Mark Levin (Temple University J.D.) recently made an important point that has not been sufficiently appreciated. The Democrats and their media poodles are always on about “saving our democracy,” but we don’t have a democracy as such. We have a republic and the Democrats, either unintentionally or intentionally, decline to understand that.
It is possible to overdo this point because the United States does have a constitutional democratic republic. That is, there is an important democratic dimension to the US political system but this democratic dimension is constrained within the strict legal “Republican” structures laid out in the Constitution. There are two main parts to Levin’s crucial point,
First, Thomas Jefferson (3rd president of the United States) was an admirer of the ancient Athenian democracy that flowered into the “Golden Age of Greece” (circa 5th century B.C.), the likes of which has not been seen since, producing figures such as historians Herodotus and Thucydides, the great tragedians, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, the great philosophers, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and many more. But even though Jefferson regarded Aristotle as one of the four most important political thinkers of all time, he saw critical weaknesses in Athenian democracy:
“They had just ideas of the value of personal liberty, but none at all of the structure of government best calculated to preserve it. They knew no medium between a democracy . . . and abandonment … to an aristocracy, or tyranny independent of the people. It seems not to have occurred that where the citizens cannot meet to transact their business in person, they … [can] choose agents who shall transact it; [that is,] a republican [representative], or popular government, …“
In simpler terms, a constitutional “Republican” or “representative” government with a core stable “structure”, not a pure democracy where the citizens directly decide everything by direct vote, is more stable and secure than a “pure” or “direct” democracy. The political system in the US, as much as the Democrat party is determined to unlearn this for their own selfish reasons, is designed to avoid these ancient Greek mistakes.
This is connected with Socrates’ and Plato’s much misunderstood rejection of democracy. When Plato argues that a democracy inevitably decays into tyranny (Republic, Book VIII), he is only claiming that a “pure” democracy of his own day inevitably decays into tyranny. Plato was very worried that in a pure democracy some charming silver tongued demagogue or Messiah might arise who knew how to use fear and sophistry to convince the “mob” to make him king. Indeed, as Plato predicted, Athens, a mere hundred years after the Golden Age of Greece, had degenerated into a weak second-rate power to be replaced, eventually, by Rome. Fortunately, for us, Plato’s arguments do not work against American democracy because it has been structured as a constitutional republic precisely to avoid Plato’s criticisms.
Levin’s second more specific point is that it is not, as commonly believed, the constitution or bill of rights that protects the rights of the citizens. As former SCOTUS judge Antonin Scalia points out, every “banana republic” in the world, including the brutal former Soviet Union, has a better constitution and bill of rights than we do. This is because a constitution and bill of rights is simply a piece of paper that tyrannical authorities can invoke or ignore as they please. What actually protects the rights of the citizens is the constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers, the fact that the executive, legislative and judicial branches are separate and not permitted to exert dominance over each other. The president (executive branch) must work with the laws given to it by the legislative branch as interpreted by the judicial branch. The executive branch may not interpret the law as it wishes, as Joe Biden has done for political purposes when he ignores, for political reasons (buying youth votes), the SCOTUS ruling that forgiving student loans is unconstitutional. When the executive branch can make its own laws or interpret them as it wishes, ignoring or overriding the legislature or the judiciary, one has made the transition from a president to a king.
Since Joe Biden has often been restrained by SCOTUS, he is threatening to “put a bullseye” on the Court by imposing term limits and ethics guidelines on it. That might sound reasonable but it is only a disguised ways for the legislative or executive branches to destroy separation of powers by exerting control over SCOTUS. A perpetually disgruntled member of congress who fears that some Justice might rule against her wishes, might file ethics complaints against them on flimsy grounds, claiming that they went on a cruise with someone they don’t like, in order to neuter them. Alternatively, some unhinged partisan prosecutor in some heavily partisan jurisdiction where they know they can obtain favourable jury verdict without real evidence, might file frivolous indictments against a president with whom they disagree, not because he is guilty of anything, but because they fear him (or her).
This is the situation the United States finds itself now. Since Joe Biden is deeply unpopular with the American people, he and the Democrats have used the judicial system, in violation of the constitutional doctrine of the separation of powers, to destroy their political adversaries. A trivial hush money payment to a porn star in New York, with the aid of a hyperventilating partisan “news” media, is blown up into “federal case” by a corrupt DA’s and judge in order to destroy a president they fear they cannot beat fairly at the ballot box.
Without the rigorous enforcement of the constitutional “separation of powers”, the political system of the United States becomes vulnerable to the problems Socrates and Plato saw in a “direct” democracy, including its tendency to slide into tyranny. The masses, whipped up by a corrupt raft of “news” media poodles into an irrational hatred of one Party or person, is emotionally manipulated, usually in the service of short term gain, to support the elimination of the constitutional protections provided by the separation of powers, thereby enabling would-be tyrants to “justify” judicial lawfare to destroy or bankrupt their political opponents. Thus, when the Democrats and their media propagandists rant about “saving our democracy”, what they are in actually doing is attempting to weaken the republican constitutional structures that prevents unscrupulous people seizing political power for themselves in the name of “the people”. It has nothing to do with “saving democracy”. Quite the contrary! Democratic processes survive best within a limiting constitutional republican framework. Finally, history teaches that it will be that same manipulated populace, no longer protected by the system of checks and balances of constitutional separation of powers, that will suffer most from the inevitable ensuing tyranny.
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