Deliberation and the Midterm

In The Boston Globe, Elvin Lim explains why we should not expect radical change as a result of the midterm:

Though Congress makes laws, the president has the power to veto them. Similarly, although the power to declare war is an executive power, and the power to impeach is a judicial power, both of those are given to Congress. All told, the Founders were less concerned with the straight-up separation of powers--which would have promoted efficiency and made change easier--than with ensuring that no one branch would possess unchecked power. Even within the Congress, the slower and more deliberative Senate exerts a check on the more populist House.

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Not only did the Founders institute a rigorous system of checks and balances, just for good measure, they made it nearly impossible to tamper with this system by amending the Constitution. After all, the very point of a written constitution is, as Alexander Hamilton put it in Federalist Paper 1, to lock into place our collective decisions when they were derived by ”choice and deliberation,” and not by ”force and accident.” Thus the Founders determined that any movement to amend the Constitution must secure the approval of two-thirds of Congress and three-fourths of the states--an order so tall that it has happened only 17 times since the Bill of Rights was ratified in 1791.