Checks in Motion: A Policy Through Three Branches and the Bureaucracy

The idea

The exam's institutions items are usually tested one institution at a time, and the anchor's six chapters can be read as one policy's journey through all of them, which is how the checks the Constitution designed appear in practice. A problem is identified and reaches the agenda, the first two phases of the policy cycle, pushed by advocates and assessed by analysts. It becomes a bill in the House or Senate, and its fate turns on the chapter on Congress: which committee receives it, whether the majority leadership wants it, whether it survives markup, floor amendment, the second chamber, conference, and in the Senate a filibuster that only three-fifths can close; or whether it rides instead in an omnibus budget measure that leadership controls. Passed, it reaches the presidency: signature, veto, or signature with a statement about enforcement; and if Congress will not act at all, the president may reach for an executive order, effective and impermanent, or, abroad, an executive agreement that avoids the Senate. Enacted, it goes to the bureaucracy for implementation, the third phase: to a cabinet department, an independent agency, a regulator or a corporation, whose rules are made, now often by negotiation, and whose conduct is overseen by congressional hearings, presidential appointments and budgets, citizens' information requests, and whistleblowers. Challenged, it goes to the courts, where a dual system offers many doors, the federal tiers run district to circuit to Supreme, four justices can call a case up, and judicial review since eighteen oh three can strike the statute or the order, activism or restraint deciding how readily, while enforcement of the ruling depends on the branches it checked. And beneath the federal story the states run the same cycle with governors' vetoes, legislatures' three jobs, and cities and counties spending property taxes under Dillon's Rule or home rule. Evaluation, the fourth phase, feeds the next problem.