[9991]

Congress sets the president's salary and has the power to fire him. The president has no such reverse power. The legislative branch is clearly the more powerful. "co-equal" is a fiction made up out of whole cloth by Nixon to further his criminal activities.

[mrkstu]

Until the party system existed, this was true. As soon as the party system evolved (pretty much immediately), with the President nominally the head of the party and the President has at least 1/3 of the Senate, the President comes near to immune from dismissal.

At that point, combined with the recent Supreme Court decisions holding 'official acts' as non-prosecutable, has swung the power meter severely to the executive.