Instead of destroying the Constitution in theory by the doctrine of this veto, it looks more as if the President did something to rescue the "check and balance" system of government, provided in the Constitution, from the threatened domination of a single department over the others in it. The fact is, Congress had succeeded, during the régime of the old Republican party in American politics, in winning a power over the President which the Constitution did not authorize. The members of Congress had selected all of the Presidents, from Jefferson to Jackson, either by nomination or by actual election. {208} The machinery constructed by the Constitution for the election of the President was wanting in its most necessary part. It contained no means of connection between the electoral colleges in the several Commonwealths in voting for the President and Vice-President, at the same time that it required a majority of all the electoral votes to elect. The members of Congress being the only national assembly of persons in the country, and being the chosen political leaders from the different Commonwealths, naturally glided into the habit of constituting themselves, in caucus, the connecting link between the electoral colleges in the several Commonwealths, and thus the Congressional caucus, or caucuses, as the case might be, became the nominating body or bodies to the electoral colleges. If the caucus nominated anybody, it left to the electors the alternative of ratifying the nomination, or of so scattering their votes as to give no person a majority, in which latter case the election of the President passed into the hands of the members of the House of Representatives. If, on the other hand, the caucus did not nominate anybody, the electors were nearly sure to fail to unite a majority of their votes upon the same person, in which case again the House of Representatives obtained possession of the election. With such an increasing control over the tenure of the President, it is not astonishing that the Congress, and even the individual members of Congress, exercised an ever increasing control over his acts and his policy. The encroaching legislature was fast developing the principle of parliamentary government as the principle of the American system, while the Constitution provides the principle of executive independence and presidential administration. Again, the judicial department had appeared to assume the position that it possessed the supreme {209} interpreting power of the Constitution upon every point. It had not then, as it has now, clearly confined itself to questions immediately involving questions of private rights. It appeared to be claiming jurisdiction in regard to questions primarily of political science, public law, and even public policy.