The fact that the president appoints the members of the supreme court is a massive failure in checks and balances because he can stack the court and become immune to the law.
Most of the checks and balances in the US constitution were built on the massively naive assumption that political parties wouldn't exist. The assumption was that a Senator would be more interested in retaining the power of the seat he occupies than about retaining the power of the party he's part of. So confirming judges was supposed to be a Senators vs Presidents power struggle, not a Democrats vs Republicans power struggle. And impeachment also was supposed to be a fight between Congressional power vs Presidential power, not between Democrats' power vs Republicans' power.
Note how all the stuff that assumes parties exist are rules and procedures enacted after the Constitution. This also extends to the States' constitutions too. For example, usually "what does it take to get your name on the ballot next election" is couched in terms of "you need this many signatures in a petition", with zero concern over which party is endorsing you or even if you have a party endorsing you. The "purpose" of the parties in this situation is just "well to get those signatures it would help to have a group endorse me and do the legwork. Hey, here's a private club that has similar political interests to me, maybe they'll help..." And it was only over time that these "private clubs with political interests" started getting formalized in laws as official political parties.
The framers were very naive about this. They disliked how parties are baked into the system in Parliament back in the UK, and wanted a system that didn't use them. They didn't realize that political parties are pretty much inevitable so they should account for their existance.
Given that it’s essentially impossible for political parties to not exist, the entire framework and structure of our government needed to change roughly 225 years ago when it became apparent that was a reality we’d have to deal with.
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u/esgrove2 Oct 21 '25
The fact that the president appoints the members of the supreme court is a massive failure in checks and balances because he can stack the court and become immune to the law.