How can Congress check the president?

Checks and balances are at the absolute core of our governmental workings. The framers designed a system that was directly opposed to one person or one group of people having all the power, and we see that through the myriad ways Congress can check the president. So what are those checks? How have they waned over the last few decades? And finally, why would Congress opt to use (or not use) them? Joining us today is Eric Schickler, professor of Political Science at UC Berkeley and author of Investigating the President: Congressional Checks on Presidential Power. Referenced in this episode: Our Starter Kit series. Our episode on impeachment from 2019. CLICK HERE: Visit our website to see all of our episodes, donate to the podcast, sign up for our newsletter, get free educational materials, and more! To see Civics 101 in book form, check out A User's Guide to Democracy: How America Works by Hannah McCarthy and Nick Capodice, featuring illustrations by Tom Toro. Check out our other weekly NHPR podcast, Outside/In - we think you'll love it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Nick Capodice?

  You're listening to Civics 101. I'm Nick Capodice.

• 0:02Hannah McCarthy?

  I'm Hannah McCarthy.

• 0:03Nick Capodice?

  And just as a quick aside, we had a team meeting this week at Civics 101 and we asked, what do we do? You know?

• 0:14Hannah McCarthy?

  I do know. I was there. Our listeners were not, so you might want to elaborate.

• 0:19Nick Capodice?

  So our show explains the basics of how our democracy works. That's our tagline. But sometimes things don't work the way they have before.

• 0:28Speaker 02

  That executive order he signed that ended the practice purported to end the practice enshrined in the Constitution of birthright citizenship.

• 0:37Speaker 03

  President's proposal to halt all federal grant and loan disbursement, a move federal judges are blocking, was illegal and an assault on the Constitution.

• 0:44Speaker 04

  A South Bay man said that he got an email from the Department of Homeland Security saying he had to leave the United States even though he's an American citizen.

• 0:57Hannah McCarthy?

  And to that point, in recent interviews in particular, we have had guests say things like, well, you know, here is how this or that worked for the last 200 years or so, and here is how it's working in 2025.

• 1:11Nick Capodice?

  Exactly. And that's going to kind of be a theme for this entire episode because today we are talking about a classic, old school 101 topic, checks and balances. One check in particular, how Congress checks the power of the president. Or doesn't.

• 1:31Nick Capodice?

  And it's worth laying out right at the top what our guest today, a scholar who has written multiple books on Congress and congressional power specifically, thinks about Congress's powers.

• 1:41Speaker 05

  I believe the framers set up this system of government that has many flaws and is not the system I would have designed if it were me. I would have designed a very different system.

• 1:53Nick Capodice?

  This is Eric Schickler, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies political parties, polarization, and the US Congress.

• 2:02Speaker 05

  But they set up this system of checks and balances and separation of powers and federalism over 200 years ago. You know, while it had many weaknesses, one of the virtues of it was that these separated institutions had the power and the incentive to defend their power, their own power in this system, preventing any one branch, any one set of actors from getting too much power.

• 2:29Hannah McCarthy?

  We do, by the way, have an entire series on core civics concepts like checks and balances and the powers of each branch. It is called Starter Kit. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. But we should do a little 101 on this episode first. Nick, what are the specific mechanisms Congress uses to check the president?

• 2:48Nick Capodice?

  All right, there are four I'm going to talk about today, and I'm going to do them one by one. So number one, the first way Congress checks the chief? The power of the purse.

• 3:01Speaker 05

  Probably first and foremost is the power over spending, that no money can be spent without Congress approving it. And so that gives them the power of the purse. You also can't lay taxes without Congress approving them.

• 3:16Nick Capodice?

  Number two, political appointments.

• 3:18Speaker 05

  Control over the staffing of the executive branch. So executive branch officials have to be confirmed by the US Senate, which gives them the Senate a lever to influence the executive branch.

• 3:30Nick Capodice?

  Number three is investigations.

• 3:33Speaker 05

  Congress has the power to supervise the executive branch, to investigate the executive branch and sort of look around and see if there are problems with what it's doing. Are they ignoring what Congress wants? Well, you hold an investigation, you expose that, and then you can take action.

• 3:49Nick Capodice?

  And number four, is that action one we've talked about many times on the show? Do you want to say it, Hannah?

• 3:54Hannah McCarthy?

  You mean impeachment?

• 3:56Nick Capodice?

  Sure do.

• 3:57Speaker 05

  And then, of course, the final kind of club is impeachment. The power of the House by a simple majority to impeach the president, and then the Senate would hold a trial, and by a two-thirds vote, has the power to convict the president, which then removes the president from office.

• 4:14Hannah McCarthy?

  We'll also put a link to our impeachment episode in the show notes. Please give it a listen if you haven't already. Quick history aside, three presidents have been impeached in the United States so far: Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump. But as of the recording of this episode, none have been removed from office following their trial in the Senate.

• 4:35Nick Capodice?

  Thank you, Hannah. And going back to how we started this episode, we're going to talk about how one check in particular used to work and how it works now. And in just this instance, when I say now, I do not mean 2025. I'm talking about the last few decades, after a marked increase in something we hear about so often, it almost has lost all meaning. And that is polarization.

• 5:03Speaker 06

  And our poll shows voters are both energized and polarized right now, with voters in both parties seeing the other side as an existential threat to the country.

• 5:12Speaker 07

  How will an ex-president unite a nation that has become so incredibly polarized? Joining me now to talk about it-

• 5:18Speaker 08

  One in six Americans have actually stopped talking to a family member or a close friend because of politics since the 2016 election.

• 5:24Hannah McCarthy?

  And you know, these days, we do hear a lot that people think America is more polarized today than it was at any other time in modern history. We did have a civil war. But Nick, how is polarization tied to Congress checking the president?

• 5:42Nick Capodice?

  Basically, if you put "party" above all else, "party" above the institution, in this instance, Congress, the checks that institution wields get weaker.

• 5:55Speaker 05

  Paul Pearson and I just finished a book, Partisan Nation. And the core argument of that book is that our constitutional system of separation of powers was premised on this idea from James Madison, that people who are in a given office, say, a member of Congress, or a president, or a Supreme Court justice, are going to look out for the power of their office. You know, the famous phrase is, "The ambition of the man needs to be tied to the power of their office." Ambition to counter ambition. And that was kind of what underwrote our constitutional system for about 200 years.

• 6:40Nick Capodice?

  However, things started to shift in the 1970s. And then there was a big shift in the 1990s. And polarization has continued to rise. We are now at a point where some politicians care more about protecting the party than they do about protecting, in essence, the purpose of their job, their powers, what the Constitution says they can and can't do.

• 7:05Speaker 05

  When members of an institution, in particular, members of Congress, care only about their party and their ideology and don't care about the power of their branch, then that undercuts that system that gives them an incentive to just side with the president of their own party and ignore the power of their institution. Right? The development of nationalized polarization, where the two parties are essentially these two armies fighting it out, where the stakes are seen as existential, has diminished the extent to which office holders in other positions, members of Congress and also Supreme

• 7:47Speaker 05

  Court justices, show primary allegiance to their office and instead leads them to behave like members of a team, a partisan team. And that just entirely undercuts this Madisonian system and is what gives rise to the danger of a president who's essentially unchecked by anyone.

• 8:10Hannah McCarthy?

  Does Eric have any recent examples of Congress not acting like this?

• 8:15Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, he did. He had one specific example. I was barely alive when this happened. You certainly were not, Hannah. Do you know about the Iran-Contra affair?

• 8:25Speaker 09

  A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.

• 8:38Hannah McCarthy?

  I do, definitely not enough. I believe it was during the Reagan administration, people were selling arms illegally.

• 8:46Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, and it was a many-year, many-twists-and-turn scandal. Higher-ups in the Reagan administration sold weapons to Iran. Iran was under a weapons embargo at the time. And the contra part is that they used money from this sale to support the Contras, which was a rebel group in Nicaragua.

• 9:04Hannah McCarthy?

  All right. Congress passed the arms embargo, and Reagan's office went around it and sold stuff anyway.

• 9:11Nick Capodice?

  Yeah. So if you're a ride-or-die Reagan fan who happens to also be in Congress, what are you gonna do?

• 9:19Hannah McCarthy?

  Well, I know he had them, so what did they do?

• 9:22Speaker 05

  While many Republicans stuck with Ronald Reagan, there were key Senate Republicans who were really concerned about what happened, about laws passed by Congress being circumvented. And they worked on the Iran-Contra Committee to uncover what happened. And several of them signed a report by the Democratic majority that was highly critical of the Reagan administration. So you can, in a sense, think of that as an almost last hurrah for how Congress used to work.

• 9:54Nick Capodice?

  But then, Hannah, along comes 1994. Shawshank Redemption, Beanie Babies, and the Republican Party takes control of the Senate and the House, where they'd been out of power for 40 years.

• 10:08Speaker 10

  Conventional wisdom holds the party of a sitting president loses seats in the midterm elections. But this was a political earthquake, with the fault line running right through Capitol Hill. When the dust had settled and the debris...

• 10:20Speaker 05

  You get the rise of Newt Gingrich. And Gingrich's entire theory in rising to power was, the way to win control of the House is to destroy the House's credibility, to argue that the Democratic House was fundamentally corrupt, unethical, and hostile to the American people.

• 10:42Speaker 11

  It tells you something about how out of touch they are with the American people, that every item in our contract is supported by 60% or more of the American people. Some of the items are supported as much as 80% of the American people. And outside Washington, this is a contract with Americans for America.

• 11:05Speaker 05

  And so he made that the centerpiece of their campaign and brought in a generation of Republicans who came there, basically campaigning on the idea that the system is fundamentally corrupt and the House is a kind of enemy. Starting in the mid 1990s, you get a new kind of member of Congress who doesn't see themselves as there for a career and therefore doesn't have the kind of stake in Congress's power that previous generations had.

• 11:36Nick Capodice?

  All right, so we got the then and the now. We have laid out how things work for most of US history and how they've started to shift in the last couple of decades. And now I'm going to get to the now now. What does it look like when Congress uses or doesn't use their powers that check the president in 2025 at a time of an extreme us versus them mentality? But first, we got to take a quick break.

• 12:00Hannah McCarthy?

  And before that break, just a reminder, you can check out any of our hundreds of episodes, as well as some snazzy Civics 101 swag, at our website, civics101podcast.org.

• 12:14Nick Capodice?

  There is nothing quite like having stuff in your closet that you love and you know you can count on for any occasion, except maybe giving someone else that feeling. And this holiday season, Quince is where I'm finding those pieces. Quince makes elevated, everyday essentials using premium materials like Mongolian cashmere, organic cotton, and it is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. They work directly with ethical factories that cut out the middleman, so you get luxury quality pieces without the luxury price tag. As this lovely fall is winding to a close and we slouch into winter, I wish more than anything, someone had gifted me a yak wool hoodie.

• 12:59Nick Capodice?

  I'm dead serious. It's good enough for the yak. I mean, it works really well for the yak, right? It would work for me. And it looks hot. So give the gift of quality this holiday season. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK as well. And last thing, when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was Civics 101. It's the best way to support the show. All right.

• 13:34Nick Capodice?

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• 14:19Nick Capodice?

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• 14:40Hannah McCarthy?

  We're back. We're talking about the relationship between Congress and the president. And Nick, you just set us up for the then versus now breakdown of the ways that Congress checks the president.

• 14:52Nick Capodice?

  Absolutely, and I'm going to focus on one of those. And it's the one with the name that I've always loved. It sounds like something you'd hear at the Ren Faire. The power of the purse. Here again is Eric Schickler, professor of political science at UC Berkeley.

• 15:08Speaker 05

  So traditionally, the understanding essentially has been that Congress writes appropriations bills. Those bills say this amount of money is going to be spent on this program. And the president is obligated, with very narrow exceptions, to spend that money.

• 15:27Nick Capodice?

  An appropriations bill, simply, is a bill that appropriates money.

• 15:31Hannah McCarthy?

  As in the bill that says where the money is gonna go.

• 15:34Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, the government can't pay for a ham sandwich or a water treatment plant or an interstate high-speed rail program unless it is through an appropriations bill.

• 15:45Nick Capodice?

  And the Constitution is pretty blunt about this, like hands on its hips in the doorway with the stern expression, Article 1, Section 9, it says, quote, "No money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequence of appropriations made by law."

• 16:00Hannah McCarthy?

  Congress is also in charge of bringing money in. The tried and true way in this nation, of course, is taxes.

• 16:07Nick Capodice?

  It is indeed. So a little bit more of our very to the point Constitution here. Quote, "All bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives, but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills."

• 16:21Hannah McCarthy?

  And can you just get to like, why the House specifically?

• 16:24Nick Capodice?

  Because it is the people's chamber. The number of people in your state determines how many reps you have in the House, and they have short, two-year terms. They are on the hook to listen to their constituents. James Madison wrote about this in The Federalist 58. He even dropped the expression in there. He said, quote, "This power over the purse may in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people," end quote.

• 16:55Hannah McCarthy?

  So Congress says, this is how we're spending money. What if hypothetically, a president in turn said, no, not going to do it?

• 17:05Speaker 12

  President Trump signing an executive order to cut funding to public broadcasting. We're taking a look at funding that includes NPR, PBS, what they receive, the salaries, executive talent, their pay. Joining us now to discuss is Rachel Bryant.

• 17:19Nick Capodice?

  Look, I'm not even going to dance around the word hypothetically today, Hannah. A very recent example of something directly tied to this just happened. May 1, Law Day, by the way, President Trump signed an executive order directing the Corporation for Public Broadcasting to, quote, "Cease federal funding for NPR and PBS," end quote. And that funding was the result of a congressional appropriation.

• 17:42Speaker 13

  Federal funding notably counts for about 15% of PBS's and 1% of NPR's budget, with the rest largely coming from outside donations.

• 17:53Nick Capodice?

  Now, the amount of money the CPB gets isn't terribly relevant here because we're talking about who has the power to spend and not spend, not how much. But I'm going to put it in anyways. It is $535 million, 0.001% of the federal budget.

• 18:09Hannah McCarthy?

  We made an episode on the Corporation for Public Broadcasting a while ago, by the way, and we dropped it in the feed last week for people who maybe missed it or wanted a little reminder. So check that out if you want. So Congress approved that funding for the CPB. They put that in their budget. And that was two years ago, right?

• 18:28Nick Capodice?

  Yeah, their funding happens in two-year cycles. This is by design to protect public media from being affected by political pressures.

• 18:36Speaker 05

  If the president in the past were to refuse to do that, well, a couple of consequences would follow. One is, you know, the potential for legal action from those who are supposed to receive the money. But another is, and probably the more powerful one, just came from Congress itself. Well, if the president wants appropriations for other things that the president cares about, we're not going to give you those appropriations unless you spend, abide by our preferences, by the laws we passed jointly with you. And so that was a tremendous lever because, you know, it's been clear, essentially, that the president cannot spend money that has not been appropriated. And so that, in a sense, gives Congress a

• 19:20Speaker 05

  veto. And so, you know, if the president is arbitrarily refusing to spend money that Congress has approved, well, Congress has a pretty powerful lever. It could, for example, threaten not to fund the White House and the executive branch itself.

• 19:36Nick Capodice?

  Like many of our episodes, this one is about how things change. And I think it's important to note here that a fundamental shift in the way the executive branch views its power versus Congress did not begin with President Donald Trump, but with another president, Richard Milhouse Nixon.

• 19:57Speaker 05

  So what Nixon did is something called impoundments, where he simply refused to spend billions of dollars that Congress had appropriated, targeting programs that the Democrats, who were in the majority in Congress, really liked, especially, you know, programs in Health and Human Services. And so Nixon disapproved of those programs and he simply withheld billions of dollars in spending.

• 20:25Hannah McCarthy?

  Now, how did Nixon justify withholding funds? The Constitution could not be clearer on this.

• 20:32Nick Capodice?

  Well, Nixon argued it had been done in the past. It was a tried and true presidential tradition. And he cited other presidents who had done this. But the problem here is, in all of those instances, that was money that everyone agreed should not be spent. In these situations, it was more like, Congress appropriates money to fight a war. Okay? War ends. So the president says, let's spend that money somewhere else because after all, that war is over. Both parties in Congress say, that makes a lot of sense.

• 21:04Speaker 05

  The president not spending that money is not really violating the will of Congress. Whereas here, Nixon was taking money that Congress had self-consciously approved for particular purposes and refusing to spend it. So that's set up a big showdown. There were court challenges. It seemed pretty clear the courts were going to rule against Nixon.

• 21:28Nick Capodice?

  And in the meantime, Congress passed a new law called the Impoundment Control Act. This law said that a president can withhold funds if, and only if, a majority in both the House and the Senate agree. Impoundment, by the way, is when a president seeks to delay or cancel funding that is already approved by Congress. So this act was Congress pushing back, more tightly gripping its hold on the power of the purse.

• 21:55Speaker 05

  This law passed, the House with an overwhelming majority, passed the Senate unanimously. Well, yes, a different world. We lived in a very different world back then. A Republican president, and yet this bipartisan bill passes overwhelmingly.

• 22:12Hannah McCarthy?

  But Nick, the act, the law that Eric is talking about. It isn't having its intended effect today.

• 22:19Speaker 14

  President Trump promises more job cuts. Elon Musk, leading the Doge efforts to downsize the government. And The Washington Post reports Trump is preparing to dissolve the leadership of the U.S. Postal Service and absorb the independent mail agency into his administration.

• 22:36Hannah McCarthy?

  Billions and billions of dollars, about $430 billion, dollars appropriated by Congress, have been blocked, stalled, or frozen by Donald Trump with the help of Elon Musk and Doge. And agencies and organizations are going to court over this. They're filing suits saying, "This money was appropriated to us, and we are not getting this money, and that is unconstitutional." And we're going to see how these lawsuits play out. But in the meantime, does Congress have the power to do anything here? I mean, assuming they want to? It is their power that's being overridden.

• 23:12Nick Capodice?

  Well, there's a difference between what they can do and what they will do. They recently passed a government funding bill, and that bill could have had language in it that stopped this empowerment entirely.

• 23:25Speaker 05

  Congress could have very easily included explicit provisions saying, you know, "All of these appropriated monies must be spent," right? Period. And spelled that out. And it could have also said to the president, "We're not going to pa-- you know, say there's some program the president really cares about. We're not going to appropriate money for that until we see that you're carrying out the other appropriations we have approved." Right? That's entirely in Congress's power. They could, um, say the, uh, zero out key programs that the president cares about and say, you know, "We're happy to fund these. We're not going to do it unless you show you're going to follow the law."

• 24:09Speaker 05

  Nothing has stopped Congress from doing that in principle.

• 24:12Hannah McCarthy?

  But they didn't.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  They didn't.

• 24:14Hannah McCarthy?

  So what stopped them?

• 24:15Speaker 05

  What stops them is a lack of political will, in particular that there are zero Republicans in Congress right now who would support that kind of action. Zero. Even the ones who are critical about particular cuts, Susan Collins, as Chair of Senate Appropriations, says she's concerned about what's going on. Well, as Chair of Appropriations, she could exert real influence and say, "We're not going to support a funding bill unless it includes these real restrictions with teeth that force the president to follow the law." She's done nothing like that. And, you know, and that's because she's being a good team player, a good player for her party.

• 24:58Nick Capodice?

  Congress has a whole arsenal of tools to act on this, but so too does the president. It's a two-way street. Because the more we age and grow as a nation, the more acts we create. And with acts come exceptions to almost every rule. Now, here's how it could go. Congress could say, "You can't spend or withhold money, Mr. President." And the president could respond by saying, "Well, I can, because I'm declaring an emergency and I can spend as I please." And Congress could respond, saying, "Well, we're removing emergency powers." And the president could come back and say, "Nope, I'm going to veto that." And then 2/3 of both chambers could override the veto. These, Hannah, these are the checks in place. Not theoretically, actually in place, enacted

• 25:43Nick Capodice?

  by Congress itself. But none of those checks are going to happen if there isn't, as Eric said, the political will to do so.

• 25:53Hannah McCarthy?

  Okay. But why?

• 26:01Hannah McCarthy?

  I mean, I understand that Congress can check the president, that they are choosing not to, and that the reason is they don't have the political will to do so. But why? Why do they lack the political will?

• 26:15Nick Capodice?

  Well, it might be because Congress itself is being checked by, quite possibly, the most powerful check you can have in a democracy. Us, the people.

• 26:29Speaker 05

  So I think the public tends not to be very focused on these balance of power questions and inner branch relation questions and worrying about it in terms of defending Congress's power, per se. And I think that's especially the case when Congress itself is not giving a clear articulation of that interest, right? And maybe if you had members of both parties saying Trump is violating the Constitution, is taking action that's against the intentions of the framers, which I think is right, that might get the public's attention. But in the absence of that, I don't think there's that much public pressure on the institutional

• 27:14Speaker 05

  question. I think there may well be public pressure if, for example, these cuts damage programs that the public really counts on, right? And so there'll be concern, for example, if the cuts to the Social Security Administration continue to lead the long wait times for customer service, I mean, that kind of thing generates pressure. But unfortunately, I don't think that the public is concerned for Congress's role, per se. And I don't think Congress itself has done a good job of trying to make that salient to voters.

• 27:54Nick Capodice?

  So the purpose of this episode, now that we're at the end of it, is to just create a better understanding of what one check could and should look like, that the president is not the be all, end all of exerting the people's will, and Congress is our most direct line to governmental power and action. And maybe one thing that could aid in that understanding is what we try to do here each and every week, Anna, to help people understand their right to make change, to understand how the government was built to function, and why it was built that way.

• 28:32Nick Capodice?

  So, as I feel I'm going to say a lot at the end of these episodes in the months to come, if you don't like something, complain loudly. It's your check. So use it.

• 28:50Nick Capodice?

  Well, that is it for today on Congress, Jack and the President. I was gonna say like, "Check, please." That felt a bit foolish. This episode is made by me, Nick Capodice, with you, Hannah McCarthy, and Christina Phillips, our senior producer. Marina Hanke is our producer, and Rebecca Lavoy, our executive producer. And boy, howdy, do we check that executive pretty much every day. Thank you, Rebecca. Music in this episode from Epidemic Sound, Halis Niko, Kilo Kaz, Scott Grattan, Chris Zabriskie, you beauty, and, wait for it, Moby. Yeah, right? That Moby. Moby is offering hundreds of free music tracks to nonprofits for creative projects. This isn't like a paid advertisement here

• 29:30Nick Capodice?

  for Moby. I had play in my Discman in the early aughts until it pretty much broke in half. So, thank you, Moby. Good on ya. Sat next to a bar on Avenue B in 2003. Do you remember that? Anyways, Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio.

• 29:53Speaker 15

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