Arguments Against Checks And Balances

Our founding fathers had many goals, among those goals was to avoid tyranny. Baron de Montesquieu said that the most efficient way to avoid tyranny is to prevent each person from belonging to more than one branch of Government. No branch of Government would be more dominant than another, and all three branches would depend on one another. In order to do this, many different systems were setup to prevent the abuse of power. Federalism was one of these systems. Federalism was designed to balance the power of the State governments and limit the powers of the national government. Jefferson and others were convinced that state governments were closer to the people and because of that, more democratic. Checks and balances were used to separate the powers. The government was divided into

In my opinion, checks and balances are still very important in today’s government. Many think that the government has grown too large for checks and balances but as of now, this system is still working to balance our government. The advantage of checks and balances, is that they prevent corruption of power by having the government limit its own influence. Checks and balances sometimes causes argument between the branches of government such as, Impeachment trials, Presidential vetoes, Supreme Court reversals, and many more. Critics of checks and balances say that the system complicates policy making and makes it more difficult to complete as a whole. Sometimes the system can even result in a standoff among the three branches. Some politics also claim that checks and balances are not suitable to create a true democracy, because they can force the majority to give in to the minority vote. With this, the system encourages compromise to avoid larger problems. The endless compromise by the system can be frustrating, but it has also proven its success at avoiding the rise of tyranny in