Past, Present, and Future
April 10, 2025 • #Here’s a useful way of thinking about the domains of our three branches of government, from Yuval Levin’s American Covenant:
It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the Congress is expected to frame for the future, the president is expected to act in the present, and the courts are expected to assess the past. These boundaries are not perfectly clean, of course.
How distinct this delineation of roles is between the branches of government is up for debate, but this is a useful way to think about the Framers’ intention in designing the balanced separation of powers.
- Legislators frame laws for the future
- The president acts on them today
- Judges compare what’s happening today and planned for tomorrow against precedents set in the past
We tend to run into trouble when any of the branches strays outside its primary domain.
When the executive is designing Big Plans for the future, or when the judiciary is issuing punishments in the present, or (in what I’d say is our worst problem today) the legislative isn’t doing anything, we get into fraught territory.
While each of these has its primary focus on a particular time horizon, they aren’t the sole arbiters of decision making with respect to their domain. Our complex array of checks allows each to assert influence over other areas. I just find this a useful compression of the general model of the system.