Over the past decade, Roman institutions of emergency government have attracted the attention of a growing number of scholars. But this outpouring of new scholarship has obscured an equally critical aspect of the late republican constitution: the simultaneous introduction of new forms of executive and legislative obstruction, founded in significant part on the strategic manipulation of Roman religious rituals. Thus this article seeks to establish that constitutional checks were not deteriorating but proliferating in the late republic. Even as old constitutional barriers to action were swept aside in the increasingly violent contest between optimates and populares, new configurations of checks and balances were being improvised to take their place, often with no clear legal warrant, occasionally drawing on the same idiom of state necessity and salus populi. Far from the antithesis of Roman emergency government, then, the tactics of obstruction and delay that became so prominent in the late republic can be thought of as its second face, and this may carry implications for how we understand the problem of 'emergency powers' in our own time.