Summary and Review
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Only the President may conduct diplomacy with foreign governments
and extend diplomatic recognition (Article II, Section 3).
The President is given unrestricted power to remove all executive officers and Senate approval is not required (an unspecified power derived
from Article II, Section 3).
The Independence of the Judiciary
Congress may not reduce the salary of a Federal judge while he holds office (Article III, Section 1).
Congress may not diminish the original jurisdiction of the Supreme
Court (an unspecified restriction derived from Article III, Section 2).
Congress may not abolish the Supreme Court or the office of Chief
Justice (Article III, Section 1; Article I, Section 3).
Summary and Review
All of this detail may seem somewhat confusing, so a summary and review of this information about the separation of powers and about checks
and balances should be helpful.
The Framers understood, chiefly from the experience of the States and
the general government under the Articles of Confederation, that only
through a system of checks and balances might the separation of powers
be maintained. So the Constitution contains the ingenious network of
checks and protections previously described.
These checks and balances were devised to enable each branch to resist such invasions of their proper authority. They enabled each branch to
exert some direct control over the other branches. This the Framers accomplished by overlapping some of the functions of the Federal government, so that each branch might play some part—though merely a limited part—in the exercise of the other branches’ functions.
Thus the Congress was empowered to exercise a degree of executive
and judicial power. The Senate, for example, actually exercises an executive function when it participates in the appointment and treatymaking processes; and both houses of Congress exercise a judicial
power when they impeach and remove a judge or an executive official
from office. A legislative check on the judiciary is established by the