Philip Wallach ponders recent actions of the federal government’s legislative branch.
Near the outset of Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Lewis Carroll’s sequel to Alice in Wonderland, Alice finds herself running hand in hand with the Red Queen. Exerting herself to the fullest, she can barely keep up with the chess piece, yet when they finally come to a halt, she finds that they have not moved at all. In response to Alice’s statement that, in her world, she would have expected all that running to get her somewhere, the Queen responds, “A slow sort of country! Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”
Alice’s predicament is much like that of the US Congress today. Given the second Trump administration’s frenetic pace, our legislators must run very fast indeed just to stay in the picture—and it isn’t clear their exertions are up to the task. The Senate has shown record-breaking alacrity in confirming Trump’s executive branch appointees, but in just about every other area Congress is falling behind or taking steps to shore up its own irrelevance.
Consider the current centerpiece of Donald Trump’s agenda: tariffs. The power to impose and adjust tariffs was once Congress’s crown jewel, a source of institutional clout. But since the Great Depression, generations of legislators have elevated the president at their own expense, believing this was the best way to secure a world with freer trade. That calculation proved right for a long time but has gone awry under a president with autarkic economic instincts.
MAGA lawmakers now guard the president’s discretionary power to set tariffs with the same jealousy Henry Clay had in guarding his own.
