Like this:

I have wanted to write a blog post about the president and the judiciary and how they relate for some time now, but I find it difficult to find a place to start. Usually the focus is on the relationship between the president and Congress and who is taking the reigns and is exercising more power. As both the president and Congress seem to have more power that directly affects the American people, I find it interesting to look at how the power of the presidency and the judicial branch interact. The founders designed our country to have three separate branches, each with the power to check the other, but it leaves the question to as whether or not they should be equal. The judiciary has always, or nearly always seemed to take a back seat in the issue of exercising power, and influencing government.  I wonder then, how equal the three branches were designed to be. All three branches were granted powers but initially, the judicial branch was quite weak, and the executive and legislative branches held nearly all of the power.

However, the Supreme Court has gained more power over time through actions by the chief justice and as it has established law based on its rulings. Perhaps the most significant power that it established is the power of judicial review, which allows the Supreme Court to strike down laws that it finds to be unconstitutional. This power however is more related to the legislative branch. It is designed to check the legislative branch in order to keep it from passing unconstitutional laws that violate the rights of the citizen of the United States and really has no bearing on what the president does or doesn’t do. Sure, it could declare a law unconstitutional which could affect the president, but it would (likely) only affect him the same as everyone else.  However, it could affect the president in a care directly related to him as in the case of Nixon, but that is more related to Nixon as a person and les Nixon as a president. It seems, then that the judiciary has little or no power over the president.

As far as the president having power over the Supreme Court, it would seem that he has the ability to have much more influence on the Supreme Court than it on him.  Although the president has no direct power over the Supreme Court, it is he who nominates and appoints judges and also has the ability to appoint more judges than the nine that exist today. IN this way, as FDR threatened to do in order to get his way, the president would have direct power of the judicial branch assuming Congress was on his side and would be wiling to agree to his nominations. Currently I don’t think that it would be possible for Obama to add more justices as he doesn’t have the support and I also don’t think that ne needs to as the Supreme Court doesn’t seem to against any of his proposed plans as of right now. But if he or any other president were to, I think that that action would directly violate what the founders intended. Although the president might get his way and the system might run more smoothly, that isn’t what was intended.  Even though, it is within his ability and because of that isn’t unconstitutional, a president doing that would be seen as very problematic and almost monarchical by the founders. They attempted to avoid creating a monarchy and if the president has control of the legislature as well as the Supreme Court, the president’s does seem as if it would be approaching the level of a monarch indeed.  Fortunately, as I stated before I don’t think that it is very likely to happen, but the fact that the possible is interesting considering how painstakingly the founders attempted to eliminate that possibility from the system.

Advertisement