We Need a President to Make Congress Great Again

C ongress is in a bad way these days. Just about everyone on the political spectrum agrees on that, even if they don’t all have the same grievances. With so little getting accomplished on Capitol Hill and so many powers ceded to the executive and the judiciary, Congress has devolved into the world’s biggest greenroom, a place where people just bide their time waiting for their next television appearance.

Hardly anything gets passed as legislation anymore. That is partly the one-two punch of ideological polarization (in which the parties are further apart and have less common ground to start with) and the Senate filibuster (which has made it impossible, except for a few months for the Democrats in 2009, for either party to pass new laws on a party-line vote). Those tendencies have been exacerbated by the paranoid populist style of arguing that any bipartisan cooperation is a sign that the people doing the cooperating are conspiring against their own voting base.

As liberal legal writer Steve Vladeck notes, several Supreme Court doctrines rest on the assumption that Congress can fix mistaken court readings of legislation or can fill gaps the executive wishes to see filled. That rarely happens anymore.

The budget system is also hopelessly broken, with budgets rarely passed through the regular process and individual members given no choice but to vote yes or no on massive, must-pass omnibus bills constructed by leadership as vehicles for anything that can get around the filibuster, which are dropped just before holiday recesses with barely time to read them. As with the decline of the legislative process, this has been going on for a decade and a half now regardless of which party controls the House, the Senate, or the White House.

In its place, not only has there been explosive growth in spending on entitlements and debt service — payments that are on autopilot without recently elected members of Congress ever voting on them — but we resort to artificial crises such as government shutdowns and debt ceiling fights as the only leverage anyone in Congress has to prevent the executive branch from controlling core congressional powers over spending. Now, the White House is raising private funds and raiding tariff-raised pots of money to do things like pay the Army and renovate the executive mansion.

The power of individual members to make laws or amend bills has almost vanished. The confirmation process has slowed to a crawl because of blind obstruction by the party out of power — impelling Republicans this year to change the rules to allow bulk confirmation votes — while many unqualified nominees get lockstep support. As Yuval Levin has detailed, Senate Republicans have not become a complete rubber stamp for second-tier Trump appointees, record numbers of whom have gone the way of Matt Gaetz. But they didn’t stop RFK Jr. or Tulsi Gabbard.

The House has always used its investigatory powers in a purely partisan fashion, but now the Senate is the same. Impeachment is such a dead letter after the failure of three presidential impeachments (one of Bill Clinton, two of Donald Trump) that Chuck Schumer got away with not even holding a trial for the impeachment of then–Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The sorts of powers we associate with Congress qua Congress (rather than Congress as an arm of one or the other political party), such as the power of the purse to bring the executive to heel, have all but atrophied.

Congress doesn’t even revisit votes on war powers. Thus, we get the Trump administration invoking 25-year-old authorizations to use military force against al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein as justification for striking Iran, while pursuing what increasingly looks like an undeclared war against Venezuela.

In the absence of an active Congress, the executive branch keeps flexing its muscles to claim the power to issue debt, spend money on student loan forgiveness or border-wall-building, impound appropriated funds, gut statutorily established departments and agencies, issue nationwide vaccine mandates and eviction moratoria, and otherwise attempt to make itself a legislature unto itself. The courts can stop some of this, and have, but procedural issues of standing, ripeness, mootness, and justiciability often make lawsuits an awkward method for vindicating the power of Congress.

Democrats, being the party currently out of power, will tell you that the problem is blind Republican obedience to Donald Trump. But all the Democrats can offer in response is either blind opposition to Trump or blind obedience to their own leaders, as we saw when they ran interference for power grabs by the Biden administration and looked away from the senescence and corruption of its head.

There are many ways in which Congress can and should reclaim its proper sense and place as the first branch of government, as the Founders expected it to be. But all of these presuppose the political will and independent political incentives to do so — neither of which is in evidence anywhere. Which leaves us with only one other possible solution: sooner or later, we will need a president to make Congress great again. A president who submits more questions to the legislature, and who proposes and demands legislative restrictions to prevent future abuses of the executive power, is the likeliest protagonist in any successful effort to restore those powers.

That won’t be Trump. And it’s hard to see where it will come from. Nobody should have been better situated for that role than Joe Biden. Only two prior presidents (Lyndon Johnson and James Buchanan) had spent half as much time in Congress as Biden’s 36 years in the Senate. Biden fancied himself a Senate institutionalist with friends across party lines and with every Democratic faction imaginable, although his actual conduct as a senator was not always respectful of Senate traditions. Yet, his presidency was characterized by some extraordinary seizures of legislative power by the executive agencies and by Biden himself. Nor, ironically, did Biden’s physical, mental, and political decline in his last two years in office lead Congress to reassert itself in the resulting vacuum.

But until such a president arrives, hope for a resurgence of the self-respect and powers of the Article I branch is more aspirational than practical.