"Getting Perspective On The Presidency"

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  Most pundits and voters, however, are comparing this era to Watergate — the last time the country saw the bonds of the constitution truly 'stretched.' While that moment "was horrible for the country to have to go through," University of Virginia presidential historian Barbara Perry told me, "it's a pristine example of the separation of powers and the checks and balance and the delicate balance working to perfection." A constitutional crisis was averted because, "each of the three branches — and I would even include the media…all of them in the constitutional structure that the founders had envisioned it would work were all working together to come to justice." In other words, Watergate showed us that the constitution worked just as the founders had intended it to do.
   So, how confident is she that this delicate balance will hold in this current era?
   "I think we are on the cusp of a constitutional crisis," Perry told me last week. She argues that it "remains to be seen whether the delicate balance of separation of powers and checks and balances the founders had devised will work – so far they are not." When I asked her what isn't working, she pointed to the election of President Trump in the first place. She argues that the "founders didn't intend for there to be demagogues in office, in fact they hoped that the electoral college would counter the populism that can lead to demagogues, and in this instance ironically it actually produced the demagogue in office."
   Congress, as an institutional check on presidential power, is also not working. The president still enjoys unified GOP support in both the House and Senate (Rep. Justin Amash represents an outlier, not a building wave of Republican opposition). So, while Democrats argue that they have a constitutional duty to impeach the president, that process only works if both branches — and both parties — are on board.
   This leaves the Supreme Court as the final institutional check on the president. It's hard to believe that the justices would vote unanimously against presidential power as they did in the 'tapes case' during Watergate. As such, Perry argues, it puts even more pressure on Chief Justice John Roberts to be, as she calls him, the 'pivot person' for how the court will act in a constitutional crisis.
   But, if the institutions aren't working as intended, Perry argues there is one check on the president that the founders didn't think all that much about; the voters.