Congress is surrendering its last vestige of power

By Noah Feldman / Bloomberg Opinion

This hasn’t been a good year for congressional authority. Consider Congress’ craven vote to claw back some $9 billion of funding it had previously allocated for foreign aid and public broadcasting. That quiet move tells you a lot about how institutional power works in Washington; especially given some of the bigger headlines of the last seven months.

First, President Trump took unilateral steps to shutter government departments like the U.S. Agency for International Development and the Department of Education, entities created by Congress to perform important government functions. Then the Supreme Court effectively blessed Trump’s actions, which lower courts had treated as unconstitutional and unlawful executive usurpations of legislative authority. Now, the rescission vote — a response to the demands of the Trump administration, which had made clear it wasn’t going to spend those funds no matter what — looks like a white flag of surrender.

Together, these three developments — Trump’s executive attack on legislative powers, the judiciary’s ratification of the assault and Congress’ own willingness to submit — herald what could be a decisive moment in U.S. constitutional history.

It is well-known that the three branches of government are not the same as they were at the founding. Each has evolved and changed, both individually and in relation to the other two. The executive, originally tiny and without substantial means of accomplishing policy objectives, has grown into what the historian Arthur Schlesinger in 1973 called the imperial presidency. The judiciary, described by Alexander Hamilton as “the least dangerous branch,” assumed the power of judicial review in the 1803 case of Marbury v. Madison, although that power was not explicitly granted by the text of the Constitution. Beginning in the early 20th century, the justices have deployed that power to strike down state and federal legislation they don’t like, while simultaneously occupying a kind of supervisory role over the rest of the constitutional system.

https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/comment-congress-is-surrendering-its-last-vestige-of-power/

All the more reason to vote the Repukes out.