Last week, I noted around here that the House Republican agenda, now being rolled out in stages, is both impressive and tragic. The substance, particularly on welfare and regulatory reform, has been quite good on the whole. But this effort has also highlighted the enormous cost the Republican Party is paying for the fact that its presidential primary electorate failed this year to select a nominee fit for the office. The agenda is being understood simply in relation to the Trump catastrophe—whether as a way of distinguishing House Republicans from Trump or as a vain effort to influence Trump or shape his course in a conservative direction.

I unfortunately think this makes most of the agenda a kind of long-term exercise, which should prove valuable in time but will not much shape the next four years. The one exception, I suggested then, could be the work of the House task force devoted to reasserting Congressional authority. Since Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump seem set to be the two major-party nominees, an assertive Congress with a clear sense of its obligation to restrain the president will be essential to the health of our system of government regardless of how the fall election goes.

That House task force released its proposals today, and they lay out a very promising agenda of constitutional revival and reform. The document forthrightly recognizes Congress’s own dereliction of its powers and responsibilities in recent decades, and commits the House Republican conference to a recovery of the legislative branch’s proper role in the system. To that end, it proposes a variety of specific steps aimed to return to Congress’s control some legislative powers that have been taken over by (because they have been effectively surrendered to) the executive branch, and to a lesser extent also the courts.

The various proposals are worth perusing, but to my mind four in particular may be most important. The first calls for reforms of the structure of the budget process (which are not specified in much detail in today’s document, but refer to the ongoing work of the Budget Committee to transform the budget process created in 1974 that has lately proven dysfunctional). The second proposes to rein in so-called “self-funding” administrative agencies (funded by fees and fines, or even by the Federal Reserve) and so to make sure that only Congress can fund federal government activities. The third would give Congress much greater oversight over major regulations. And the fourth would curtail by legislation the judicial practice of yielding to executive-agency interpretations of statutes (the so-called “Chevron deference” and related doctrines).

These proposals build on the ongoing work of the Federalist Society, the Article 1 Project (led by senators Mike Lee and Jeff Flake and Representatives Jeb Hensarling, Mia Love, Dave Brat, Barry Loudermilk, Mark Walker, Gary Palmer, Cynthia Lummis, and John Ratcliffe), and others striving to help Congress regain its proper place and role in our system. They are best understood, I think, not simply as a response to presidential over-reach but as a response to the often intentional weakness of the Congress in our time.

The agenda laid out in this document is both badly needed and well-conceived. Concrete steps to enact it can’t come soon enough.