Perhaps the most striking thing about Obama’s proposed housing plan is this nugget from The New York Times: “Except for the provision that empowers bankruptcy judges, almost all of the other elements can be enacted by Mr. Obama without further action by Congress.”

How have we gotten to the point where hundreds of billions of dollars can be spent and major initiatives undertaken merely on presidential whim? Answer: Congress has delegated so much power to the executive branch that the old rules we learned in high-school civics are now null and void. Those old rules, remember, held that the legislature made laws and the president executed laws. Now, Congress routinely delegates massive amounts of broad law-making authority to the president in order to avoid responsibility for anything. For a book-length treatment of this, see David Schoenbrod’s Power Without Responsibility: How Congress Abuses the People Through Delegation.

As Montesquieu once wrote, “When the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or in the same body of magistrates, there can be no liberty.”