The Supreme Court's Role in National Government

The Supreme Court's Role in U.S. National Government

The Constitution created a government of separate powers. Each branch of the government is responsible for exercising different governmental powers and may not encroach upon each other. However, this separation was not intended to be so rigid that the government could not function. The framers recognized that a government could be too divided in authority, leading to inefficiency and even the destruction of personal liberties.

The framers were also influenced by the weakness of the national government under the Articles of Confederation. The national government under that scheme had proved ineffectual. Consequently, they wanted to avoid a weak national government. A rigid separation of powers would have resulted in a weak government and a situation unimproved over the Articles of Confederation. They also wanted to avert the growing powers of the state governments, who often refused to work with each other.

The compromise they came up with was a balance of powers doctrine. This doctrine allowed for some overlap of powers between the branches. The reason for this was to enable each of the powers to act as a check on the other branches. Powers do not overlap in the literal sense, but each of the powers has the ability limit the powers of the others in a certain fashion. For instance, a President can be impeached by the Senate. And a bill can only be enacted if the President signs it or Congress has enough

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of the defendants must yield to the public interest in preserving the confidentiality of the President's office. The Supreme Court, however, rejected the President's argument. It said that accepting Nixon's argument for an unqualified and absolute executive privilege would prevent the judiciary from carrying out its duties under the Constitution. Access to information is necessary for the determination of guilt and innocence in the adversarial American justice system. If judgments were forced to be based upon partial or speculative presentation of the facts, the ends of the criminal justice system would be defeated. Therefore, the prosecution and the defense must be able to compel the production of evidence, or else the judicial system would lose its integrity. On the other hand, the Court recognized that the source of executive privilege lay in the Constitution. The Court said that the President must be able to exercise this privilege, because privileged communications between the President and his aides were "fundamental to the operation of the government." Although the President lost the particular conflict in this instance, the Court formalized the existence of the executive privilege and began the process of for

Category: Government - T