Unchecked and Unbalanced

The Subsuming of Congressional Ambition

Anyone who paid attention in their high school history class will be familiar with the concept of checks and balances, which is one of the core foundational principles of the U.S. Constitution. The framers intentionally divided the federal government into three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial, each with distinct powers, designed to limit the accumulation of authority in any one branch.

At the heart of this system is a principle articulated by James Madison in Federalist 51: ambition must be made to counteract ambition.

"...But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others... Ambition must be made to counteract ambition."

The idea is simple but powerful: if a president seeks to overstep their authority, Congress, driven by its ambition and desire to protect its power, will push back. This competitive tension is not a flaw, but a feature.

Yet today, that dynamic has broken down.

During President Trump’s administration, congressional Republicans have largely failed to act as an independent check on executive power. Trump has shuttered congressionally created agencies like USAID and dismissed civil servants protected by statute. He has imposed sweeping tariffs without congressional input. Despite these encroachments, there has been little resistance from Republican majorities in Congress.

What happened to Madison’s vision?

The ambition that was supposed to protect institutional boundaries has been co-opted. Many congressional Republicans no longer see themselves as representatives of a co-equal branch of government. Instead, their primary political ambition is to remain in office, an outcome increasingly tied to remaining in good standing with Trump and his base. Loyalty to the president has overtaken loyalty to the institution. President Trump has subsumed their ambition into his own.

Republicans who have chosen to retire are often the only ones willing to speak out, a telling sign of how political incentives have overridden constitutional ones.

The nature of our constitutional system requires each branch to compete against each other to ensure no one branch becomes too powerful, but today, that is not what happens. Instead, the parties compete across branches, and as long as your party controls a branch, you are happy for it to gain power. Republicans rail against an imperial presidency when Obama or Biden are in office, but then do nothing to constrain far more radical executive power grabs when Trump is in office. Unfortunately, this represents one of the greatest structural design failures of our constitutional system. Our constitution was not designed with political parties in mind, and the hyper-partisan two-party system of today has greatly undermined the key foundational principles of checks and balances.

This dynamic is part of why our current era is such a dangerous one. We not only have an authoritarian President, but we also have a Congress unwilling to check any of his worst impulses.

There is hope that Congress could begin to reassert itself if Democrats regain a majority in the 2026 elections. However, many of Congress’s most powerful checks, including impeachment and veto overrides, require supermajorities to enact.