702
Opinion of the Court
additional litigation that an affirmance of the Court of Appeals judgment might spawn—may impose an unacceptable burden on the President's time and energy, and thereby impair the effective performance of his office.
Petitioner's predictive judgment finds little support in either history or the relatively narrow compass of the issues raised in this particular case. As we have already noted, in the more than 200-year history of the Republic, only three sitting Presidents have been subjected to suits for their private actions.36 See supra, at 692. If the past is any indicator, it seems unlikely that a deluge of such litigation will ever engulf the Presidency. As for the case at hand, if properly managed by the District Court, it appears to us highly unlikely to occupy any substantial amount of petitioner's time.
Of greater significance, petitioner errs by presuming that interactions between the Judicial Branch and the Executive, even quite burdensome interactions, necessarily rise to the level of constitutionally forbidden impairment of the Executive's ability to perform its constitutionally mandated functions. "[O]ur . . . system imposes upon the Branches a degree of overlapping responsibility, a duty of interdependence as well as independence the absence of which 'would preclude the establishment of a Nation capable of governing itself effectively.' " Mistretta, 488 U. S., at 381 (quoting Buck-36 In Fitzgerald, we were able to discount the lack of historical support for the proposition that official-capacity actions against the President posed a serious threat to the office on the ground that a right to sue federal officials for damages as a result of constitutional violations had only recently been recognized. See 457 U. S., at 753, n. 33; Bivens v. Six Unknown Fed. Narcotics Agents, 403 U. S. 388 (1971). The situation with respect to suits against the President for actions taken in his private capacity is quite different because such suits may be grounded on legal theories that have always been applicable to any potential defendant. Moreover, because the President has contact with far fewer people in his private life than in his official capacity, the class of potential plaintiffs is considerably smaller and the risk of litigation less intense.
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