Maya Kornberg

Maya Kornberg is a senior research fellow and manager in the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program, where she focuses on legislative reform, government capacity, political violence, and Congress. She is the author of Inside Congressional Committees: Function and Dysfunction in Lawmaking and Stuck: How Money, Media, and Violence Prevent Change in Congress.

American Checks Still Exist, but the Branches Have Stopped Using Them

In an Aspen Ideas Festival panel, Maya Kornberg, Jack Goldsmith and Stephen Vladeck argue that American democracy’s formal checks remain on paper but are failing in practice because Congress, the presidency and the Supreme Court are no longer performing their constitutional roles. Kornberg points to a weakened, under-capacitated Congress; Goldsmith to the long expansion of executive power, intensified under Donald Trump; and Vladeck to a Supreme Court that he says has become insufficiently accountable and too willing to enable presidential power. Their shared problem is that repairing the system depends on the same institutions that have helped unbalance it.

The Aspen InstituteJul 2, 202620 min read