Yuval Levin laments Congress’ role in current constitutional struggles.
Everyone who follows American politics is going to spend a lot of time thinking about presidential and judicial power over the next few years. But to really understand the coming clashes between the president and the courts, and the constitutional environment in which they’re taking place, we have to pay attention to what isn’t happening in our system of government almost as much as to what is.
Congress is not doing its job, and the vacuum that its dereliction has created is encouraging presidential and judicial overreach. Congress’s weakness is our deepest constitutional problem, because it is not a function of one man’s whims and won’t pass with one administration’s term. It is an institutional dynamic that has disordered our politics for a generation. It results from choices that members of Congress have made, and only those members can improve the situation. It is hard to imagine any meaningful constitutional renewal in America unless they do.
A weak Congress is not the norm in the American system, and a Congress this weak would surely have surprised the authors of the Constitution. They were far more concerned about excessive congressional strength, worrying it might muscle out the executive and the judiciary. “In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates,” James Madison wrote. Looking around at the 13 state governments in the late 18th century, he observed that “the legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.”
The growth of American government and the complexity of modern life gradually empowered our presidents and the tangle of administrative agencies that surrounds them. But that did not mean that Congress had to fade into the background. …
… [M]any ambitious members of Congress have concluded that their path to prominence must run not through policy expertise and bargaining in committees but through political performance art on social media and punditry on cable news.
