Multiple points of influence due to separation of powers and checks and balances | Khan Academy

In several videos, we have touched on the idea of separation of powers between three branches of government in the United States. You have the legislative branch that writes laws and decides on the budget for the government. You have the executive branch that runs the actual government, and then you have the judicial branch that decides on the constitutionality of laws and actions by the government, as well as interprets existing laws.

Connected to this idea of separation of powers, where each of these branches are somewhat independent but not completely independent, is that they all have checks and balances on each other. We've talked about, in multiple videos, how the executive can veto a law by the legislative. The legislative can override that veto. The legislative decides on the budget that the executive has to run the government.

The judicial branch decides on constitutionality. The executive branch decides who is even going to become a justice in the Supreme Court. So when you have the separation of powers and you have these checks and balances, it provides multiple opportunities to influence policy and the actions of government.

There's two ways that you could view influence. You could view it as a positive thing. After all, it's government by the people; the people are sovereign, so they should be able to influence what the government does. But sometimes a cynical view of influence is, well, who gets to influence? Is it really by the people, or are there other interests, maybe driven by things like money, that have undue influence?

Just to get a sense of how folks can influence or where there are points of influence, first, what laws get passed or what gets funded—that's decided in the budget. Now, as an individual, as a citizen, you can write letters to your congressperson. You can petition them; you can call them up; you can show up at town halls that they hope to hold in order to speak your voice.

But there's also interest groups. Now, interest groups could be corporate interest groups; they could be unions; they could be professions. These interest groups will oftentimes also lobby Congress in order to influence what gets funded or the laws that get passed or don't get passed. The word lobbying really is just this idea of trying to influence the government.

Now, a major way— a major point of influence in the United States—is when there are elections: who actually gets elected. You can imagine there could be direct support or endorsement for different candidates. Money, especially with mass media becoming more and more important, becomes a bigger and bigger part of elections. So you can donate at an individual level, or you often see now—and this is a very controversial area—where there are heated debates on to what degree large donations can be made, to what degree corporations can influence elections.

But who gets elected is perhaps the biggest lever on our government. For example, even if your main concern is judicial, and the judicial is the one branch that is most immune from elections, Supreme Court justices are not elected; they are appointed by the president with approval from the Senate. But if you did care who is going to be in the judiciary, well, there would be a strong motivation to influence who is going to be president.

Then, even once they are president, there might be some influence, some lobbying on who they appoint to the judiciary. If a law gets passed by Congress, there's still another outlet: you could petition the executive to veto that law.

So, I'll leave you there. The main takeaway from this is that because of these checks and balances and separation of powers, there are multiple levers of influence in the government, and I've just touched on a few of them. An interesting thing to always think about is how much of our current levers of influence—especially as they exist today in our modern government—how much of this was intended by the founders of our country, the authors of the Constitution, and how much is based on things that we could have never predicted?

They could have never predicted the size of the country. They could have never predicted the influence of mass media. They could have never perhaps predicted the influence of money. Who knows? I will leave you with that question.