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It's not a check and balance when the Executive has gone rogue and the Justice Department operates under the Executive.
There is no check. There is no balance.
Remove the Justice Department from the Executive branch and place it under the Judicial branch.
Similarly, there's no check and balance on the Supreme Court either.
Make it so that the House and Senate can over-ride a bad Supreme Court decision without having to pass an Amendment to do it.
It's rock-paper-scissors, guys. President can veto the House and Senate, the Judicial should hold the executive accountable, and the House and Senate should be able to over-ride the Supreme Court.
The problem is the majority of the legislative and the head of the executive decided to collude to just ignore the constitution and then proceeded to stuff the judicial branch with their puppets. The problem with the checks and balances is they don't have an answer to "but what if 2/3rds of the government decides to wipe their ass with the constitution at the same time?".
No amount of reorganizing the deck chairs changes that calculus. The system was broken the moment they just decided not to remove Trump from office during his first impeachment. The only way I can see to do anything about that flaw is to just make it ridiculously easy to impeach any politician, say something like a general vote of the public that only requires a 25% margin to pass. Sure the Republicans absolutely would have used something like that against Obama, but at least we'd be able to clean all the corrupt bastards out of congress and the supreme court as well.
"No Confidence Vote" like in a parliamentary system.
That does require a significant majority of the executive branch to go through with it.
Impeachment is in ways similar to it.
Yup, and there's some other conditions that would benefit from an immediate recall, too. It's insane that the consequence for failing to pass a budget or raise the debt ceiling is that our financial system is damaged or collapses. Failure to get it done in a timely manner should result in an automatic extension or raise paired with snap elections on all members involved.
Or hell, even just allow recall petitions at the federal level. Better to have a revolving door than a legislature that's tempted to see what touching the third rail is like.
Or just, "what if a party works together and falls in line under a single leader"?
It should have been obvious not that this was possible, but that it was inevitable.
If that happened, seats would be constantly vacant. You'd have 75% D districts with a 25% R minority who would simply remove anybody the other side elected. The D's would retaliate by removing a R. The oligarchs would love that system because there would be nobody to pass laws that stopped their looting.
The fundamental problem is democracy.
Giving every single person a vote, no matter what, is a problem. Weighing every single vote equally, no matter what, is a problem. The GOP won because there were enough people who had lost touch with reality that their lies were believable. And, now that they won, they're going to rig the game even more, and make sure that there are no limits put on disinformation.
Democracy may be the best system we have found so far, but it has some severe failure modes.
Does someone need to retake civics or read an org chart? The Justice Department is basically the government's attorney's/prosecutors. They represent the federal government at court. They're not the criminal (article 3) federal court system or judges.
They are the group whose own internal policy prevents them from investigating and prosecuting the executive.
https://www.justice.gov/olc/opinion/sitting-president%E2%80%99s-amenability-indictment-and-criminal-prosecution
Until there's an independent agency capable of holding the Executive accountable, there is no check and balance.
According to the constitution, Congress would be the check against the executive.
While there is structural defect in the absence of a government office that could prosecute the president for violations against the government, the DOJ policy is based on executive structure & separation of powers stipulated by the constitution & its interpretation by SCOTUS.
The executive branch enforces federal laws including by prosecution by authority the president supervises & delegates to the branch's departments. As supervisor of executive branch prosecutions & bearer of executive privileges (to ensure the branch's (1) effective operation & (2) separation of powers from other branches), criminal prosecution of the (office of) president creates some conflicts. The president would basically be both defendant & prosecutor in their own criminal trial. They'd decide what evidence to present & withhold for & against them in their prosecution & defense. While the president can delegate prosecutorial powers to other people, that delegation is revocable.
The president is charged to perform unique official duties no one else is authorized to perform. In the DOJ's estimation, criminal adjudication (in the judicial branch) with "protracted personal involvement of the president in trial proceedings" would impact operation of the executive branch in ways that challenge separation of powers.
Impeachment by Congress is available in the constitution to open a convict to criminal prosecution (impeachment judgment clause).
This was all explained in your document.
Agreed, they are SUPPOSED to be the check, but the problem is, they aren't.
The way it's SUPPOSED to work is they impeach the President in the House, remove them in the Senate, then turn them over to the Justice department for criminal investigation and action.
If this process is actually going to work, what needs to happen is the Justice Department needs to run the investigation as part of the Judicial Branch, bring the evidence to the House for impeachment, the Senate for Conviction, then haul his ass off to prison.
That cannot happen as long as the Justice department is a function of the executive branch. They refuse to investigate their own sitting boss.
Placing the Justice Department under the Judicial Branch would work two fold:
First, it allows the Justice Department to actually investigate a sitting president, which they will not do currently.
Second, it would prevent the sort of actual political witch hunt that Clinton faced as it's not Congress running the investigation, it's the Justice Department.