Federalism, Three Branches & Checks on Power · Grade 7 Social Studies

Part 1 · Three branches, and what each can stop

Congress writes law, raises taxes and controls spending — the power of the purse, which you have already seen colonial assemblies use against royal governors. It can also impeach and remove executive and judicial officers. The president signs or vetoes bills, commands the armed forces, conducts foreign relations and nominates judges and officials. The courts decide cases, and federal judges hold office for life so that they need not please anyone to keep their posts.

The levers between them are what matter. A president can veto a bill; Congress can override with two-thirds of both chambers, which is deliberately hard. A president nominates judges; the Senate confirms or refuses. Congress declares war; the president directs it. Congress passes a budget; the executive spends it.

The two chambers are themselves a check on each other, and were designed on different principles. The House is apportioned by population and elected every two years, so it answers quickly to whoever is angry this season. The Senate gives every state two seats regardless of size, and until the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913 its members were chosen by state legislatures rather than voters, with six-year terms staggered so only a third face election at once. A bill must satisfy both a chamber built to respond and one built to resist.

Notice that each lever requires the other branch to act. A veto is not a decision to end a bill, it is a demand for a larger majority. Confirmation is not a formality, it is a second and independent judgement. The design makes unilateral action nearly impossible, which is the point rather than a flaw.

Part 2 · Federalism: two governments over the same ground

Every American lives under two governments at once. The national government holds enumerated powers listed in the Constitution: coining money, regulating interstate and foreign commerce, declaring war, running the post. The states hold what the Tenth Amendment calls the powers not delegated — historically most of criminal law, property, contracts, marriage, schools and local government.

Some powers are held by both. Taxing is the clearest: federal income tax and state sales or income taxes operate side by side, which is why your situation depends on which state you live in. Where the two conflict, the supremacy clause makes valid federal law prevail, and that clause is a direct answer to the Confederation's inability to make state courts honour treaties.

Federalism also explains something students notice early: why so much of daily life varies across a state line. Marriage ages, speed limits, school curricula, the voting age for local elections, which crimes carry which penalties and whether homeschooling requires notice are all state questions, which is why the homeschool law pages on this site run to fifty-one different answers. The Constitution of 1787 is the reason that list is not one page long.

The boundary has never been settled and was not meant to be. Whether a power belongs to Washington or to Albany has been argued in nearly every decade since 1789, through the Marshall Court, the nullification crisis, the Civil War, the New Deal and since. The Constitution set up the argument rather than ending it.

Part 3 · The power nobody wrote down

The most consequential power of the courts does not appear in the Constitution. Nothing in the text says the Supreme Court may declare an act of Congress unconstitutional. The Court claimed that authority for itself in Marbury v. Madison in 1803, reasoning that if the Constitution is law and judges decide what law means, a judge faced with a statute conflicting with it must follow the higher one.

The circumstances were politically delicate, and Marshall's solution was adroit: the Court ruled against Marbury, who was seeking his commission, so no official was ordered to do anything and the decision could not be defied — while establishing a far greater power in the reasoning.

Judicial review is now so familiar that it is easy to assume it was designed. It was argued for in Federalist 78 and assumed by some delegates, but it was not enacted; it was asserted and then accepted. That is worth remembering whenever someone says the Constitution clearly requires something — one of its central features is a judicial claim that stuck.

Part 4 · Why slow was the point

The framers had watched state legislatures in the 1780s pass paper-money laws and debtor relief that wiped out creditors, reverse them, and reverse them again. They concluded that an unchecked majority could be as dangerous as a king, and that what a republic needed was not speed but friction.

History has tested the friction repeatedly, and the record is mixed in exactly the way the design predicts. The Senate rejected the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 despite a president who had negotiated it. The Court struck down New Deal statutes in 1935 and 1936 until the political pressure shifted. Only twenty-seven amendments have passed since 1789, and one of them repealed another. Each of those is the machinery working, and reasonable people disagree about every one of them.

So the machinery is full of delay by design: two chambers chosen differently and on different cycles, a presidential term that does not align with congressional ones, judges serving for life, and an amendment rule needing two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. A measure that cannot survive several independent agreements over time does not become law.

The cost is real and worth naming. The same friction that blocks a bad law blocks a good one, and the same structure that protected creditors in the 1780s protected slavery for seventy years, because abolishing it required majorities that the South could always block. When you reach the sectional crisis in chapter seven, remember that the deadlock was not a failure of the system. It was the system working as designed, on a question where the design made the outcome intolerable.