Your defense of Congress as the constitutional heart of the system is both necessary and refreshing. The distinction you draw between media-inflated presidential expectation and Article I authority is particularly important in an era that treats initiative as synonymous with leadership.
I am curious, however, whether the decline you describe is principally cultural or structural. Delegations of conditional authority, continuing resolutions, and broad statutory frameworks often appear individually defensible. Yet taken together they seem to relocate the decisive political moment away from recurring legislative choice and toward executive activation and judicial review.
Formally, Congress remains preeminent. Functionally, one might ask whether operational authority has migrated in ways that are self-reinforcing.
Do you see the present weakness as primarily a failure of will — something recoverable through civic and institutional reform — or as a structural equilibrium produced by the scale and speed of modern governance?
Thanks for reading my piece and writing to me. You are quite right: "Delegations of conditional authority, continuing resolutions, and broad statutory frameworks often appear individually defensible. Yet taken together they seem to relocate the decisive political moment away from recurring legislative choice and toward executive activation and judicial review."
Yes, this is how we got a giant executive branch with hundreds of agencies, thousands of programs, and all sorts of delegations. A conglomerate was built by Congress via aggregation over decades.
And, yes, sadly these things all affect the mindset of each new wave of legislators who arrive in Washington. Most of them see what exists as the norm and the presidency as it presently exists as the way it should be. So, it is a self-reinforcing. It is not, to be clear, an unbreakable dynamic. Congress took back power in the 1940s and 1970s and they can do so again. We the people must goad them to do so, and legislators themselves must crave to reclaim authorities so that they can more truly be lawmakers and members of the First Branch.
An idea that you thread throughout that I think merits (very much so) more unpacking and problem-solving: the cultural faults in and around Congress, and the political process more generally. That, as opposed to alleged faults in "productivity," i.e., "Congress doesn't do anything." As you show, Congress does indeed do things.
But what I find more compelling are these instances you cite of members of the public expressly wanting Congress *not* to do things. To, instead, seek policy hacks through the executive and judiciary. You note an activist angle to this: "There’s a whole ecosystem of interest groups and private actors whose entire operations are geared to co-opt the second and third branches of government to achieve their policy goals." You note a media angle to this: "These days, media stories place the president at the center of just about every political and policy story. Even when Congress writes a 1,500-page spending bill, it is inevitably described as the work of the president." You note even a congressional angle itself to this: "[M]ore and more we see senators and members of the House of Representatives behave as if they believed that real change should be made through executive or judicial action. Some legislators go so far as to behave as if they are mere employees of the White House."
One could go even further. I've joked about the presidential campaign angle, of surrogates at least as far back as Charlton Heston in 2000 calling that year's election "the most important in our history" or some such — this in a time when America had vanquished communism, was at peace, economically dominant, at the apotheosis of soft power, etc. There's a more tangible angle with which we're both familiar, of congressional primary politics — and whether one wants to call the problem structural or organizational (i.e., nothing is stopping would-be candidates or current electeds interested in bargaining and compromising, instead of bomb-throwing, from running/ forming factions), the problem itself exists and is substantial. The way that party platforms are framed every four years indicate that the presidency is a hyper-ideological office that drives policymaking, and Congress's role is to reflexively support or oppose it. (Perhaps we do need a 29th Amendment! https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-congress-was-saved)
An "et cetera" might be appropriate here; a full accounting of the "angles" could result in a shape more faceted than a cut diamond.
Together, we live in an almost horrifyingly misguided "representative democracy," whose cultural energies at the cohort level (media, activist, campaign, voter, et al) are all directed toward making the presidency and federal courts the only relevant entities in all politics — to the exclusion not just of Congress, but of states and localities, as well, in their roles as part of a federalist system. I would take issue with any rebuttal that claims all this is bellyaching over "vibes" — it underrates the relevance of such vibes to setting the parameters for political activity and outcomes. The existential and increasingly apocalyptic politics of the presidency are directly upstream our current political moment.
("How to address this" is 10,000 words longer. I'm concerned that too much of the polity now sees politics as a process of one "side" crushing the other "side" by any means necessary for it to be possible. But it's a part of the story, the "cultural" part, that I'm eager to see people trying to define and address, as you begin to in this post.)
Thanks, Chris! There is so much to say, but one question I have is this: will voters tire of the "the most important in our history" message? Will "the little boy who cried wolf" effect occur? Already, to a degree, I sense that voters are less responsive to the charge that DJT is a fascist who wants to reign in perpetuity because they have been hearing this criticism for years. Might the next presidential election be a bit less "OMG THE WORLD MAY END IF YOU VOTE WRONG"? I sure hope so.
When I taught federal government at community college (an extremely fulfilling endeavor BTW), the first question of the first day was "what is the first branch of government?". It won't take three guesses as to what the answer was. They thought it was the president. The rest of the course was emphasizing the powers of Congress and thereby, the powers of them, the voters. Mr. Kosar's article articulates the constitutional framework very well.
The other thing which I emphasized in my class and which is a very, very big problem is how the sidelining of Congress takes away the people's power to have a say in their own governance. Because of a lot of forces, which I mostly shorthand as "corporate thinking", Americans are starting to lose their own sense of agency. Throughout the course, I always, even when discussing the Executive and Judicial branches emphasized how Congress can override the actions of these two branches. And I emphasized how the people could make Congress do what it wants.
Here is the fulfilling part. When students trained by public schools which don't allow teachers to develop students' critical thinking skills, political campaigns which manipulate emotions like corporate marketers, and most of all by "journalism" that refuses to tell a complicated and nuanced story, they start thinking like docile peasants just waiting out their feudal lord's abuse. As they learn they have real power, the more excited they get. Then, it's just a matter of learning the process.
The great part about community college is these are the students (many of whom are adult learners) have experienced first hand the effects of congress not doing its job. They get it much faster than the suburban high school kids I also taught. Show everyday people of the ropes and stand back and watch.
Thank you! And thank you for teaching! Yeah, a lot of folks think the president is the prime mover. Excessive media coverage has encouraged this perception. I am delighted you are teaching students the powers of Congress and connecting it to their powers as voters. Wonderful! Too many Americans see no connection, which is one reason they disengage/quit voting and/or yell about DC.
The media/presidential inflation point is one of the most underappreciated structural problems in American governance — the mismatch between constitutional reality and public expectation creates a feedback loop that degrades both branches simultaneously. It's something I've written about at length, and it's rarely stated this clearly.
Congress reclaiming its authority is necessary and right. What I'd add from my own work: even a fully re-engaged Congress faces a capacity problem that resources alone don't close. Immigration and the budget aren't just politically difficult — they're design problems requiring sustained technical work that doesn't fit inside electoral cycles. The pattern of legislators preferring to campaign on issues rather than resolve them isn't cynicism — it's rational behavior inside a system that structurally rewards keeping problems alive over solving them. The incentive architecture selects for it.
Which points to a deeper gap. The design function for governance itself — building institutional architecture that makes complex solutions implementable and durable — has no professional home in our system. More staff and better tools are necessary but not sufficient. That's the structural layer underneath the capacity problem your work identifies.
100 percent. I have spent a decade studying congressional capacity and goading Congress to invest in itself.
And certainly our elections provide very limited incentives for legislators to tackle complex, high salience problems. It is easier to stir voters with rhetoric than to build a cross-partisan coalition that pushes durable reform forward.
A decade of that work shows — the capacity research is some of the most useful diagnostic material available. The incentive problem and the capacity problem feel related but I think they're distinct failure modes. Even if you fixed the electoral incentives tomorrow, Congress would still lack a professional function for designing solutions to problems of that complexity. Both need to be solved, probably in parallel.
I agree. And that’s why we are screwed politically. At least Trump, despite many faults, is attempting to overturn some of the past travesty and move us forward. Except for Congress.
Dr. Kosar,
Your defense of Congress as the constitutional heart of the system is both necessary and refreshing. The distinction you draw between media-inflated presidential expectation and Article I authority is particularly important in an era that treats initiative as synonymous with leadership.
I am curious, however, whether the decline you describe is principally cultural or structural. Delegations of conditional authority, continuing resolutions, and broad statutory frameworks often appear individually defensible. Yet taken together they seem to relocate the decisive political moment away from recurring legislative choice and toward executive activation and judicial review.
Formally, Congress remains preeminent. Functionally, one might ask whether operational authority has migrated in ways that are self-reinforcing.
Do you see the present weakness as primarily a failure of will — something recoverable through civic and institutional reform — or as a structural equilibrium produced by the scale and speed of modern governance?
— CIVIS AMERICANUS
Thanks for reading my piece and writing to me. You are quite right: "Delegations of conditional authority, continuing resolutions, and broad statutory frameworks often appear individually defensible. Yet taken together they seem to relocate the decisive political moment away from recurring legislative choice and toward executive activation and judicial review."
Yes, this is how we got a giant executive branch with hundreds of agencies, thousands of programs, and all sorts of delegations. A conglomerate was built by Congress via aggregation over decades.
And, yes, sadly these things all affect the mindset of each new wave of legislators who arrive in Washington. Most of them see what exists as the norm and the presidency as it presently exists as the way it should be. So, it is a self-reinforcing. It is not, to be clear, an unbreakable dynamic. Congress took back power in the 1940s and 1970s and they can do so again. We the people must goad them to do so, and legislators themselves must crave to reclaim authorities so that they can more truly be lawmakers and members of the First Branch.
Cheers!
Great piece, Kevin.
An idea that you thread throughout that I think merits (very much so) more unpacking and problem-solving: the cultural faults in and around Congress, and the political process more generally. That, as opposed to alleged faults in "productivity," i.e., "Congress doesn't do anything." As you show, Congress does indeed do things.
But what I find more compelling are these instances you cite of members of the public expressly wanting Congress *not* to do things. To, instead, seek policy hacks through the executive and judiciary. You note an activist angle to this: "There’s a whole ecosystem of interest groups and private actors whose entire operations are geared to co-opt the second and third branches of government to achieve their policy goals." You note a media angle to this: "These days, media stories place the president at the center of just about every political and policy story. Even when Congress writes a 1,500-page spending bill, it is inevitably described as the work of the president." You note even a congressional angle itself to this: "[M]ore and more we see senators and members of the House of Representatives behave as if they believed that real change should be made through executive or judicial action. Some legislators go so far as to behave as if they are mere employees of the White House."
One could go even further. I've joked about the presidential campaign angle, of surrogates at least as far back as Charlton Heston in 2000 calling that year's election "the most important in our history" or some such — this in a time when America had vanquished communism, was at peace, economically dominant, at the apotheosis of soft power, etc. There's a more tangible angle with which we're both familiar, of congressional primary politics — and whether one wants to call the problem structural or organizational (i.e., nothing is stopping would-be candidates or current electeds interested in bargaining and compromising, instead of bomb-throwing, from running/ forming factions), the problem itself exists and is substantial. The way that party platforms are framed every four years indicate that the presidency is a hyper-ideological office that drives policymaking, and Congress's role is to reflexively support or oppose it. (Perhaps we do need a 29th Amendment! https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/how-congress-was-saved)
An "et cetera" might be appropriate here; a full accounting of the "angles" could result in a shape more faceted than a cut diamond.
Together, we live in an almost horrifyingly misguided "representative democracy," whose cultural energies at the cohort level (media, activist, campaign, voter, et al) are all directed toward making the presidency and federal courts the only relevant entities in all politics — to the exclusion not just of Congress, but of states and localities, as well, in their roles as part of a federalist system. I would take issue with any rebuttal that claims all this is bellyaching over "vibes" — it underrates the relevance of such vibes to setting the parameters for political activity and outcomes. The existential and increasingly apocalyptic politics of the presidency are directly upstream our current political moment.
("How to address this" is 10,000 words longer. I'm concerned that too much of the polity now sees politics as a process of one "side" crushing the other "side" by any means necessary for it to be possible. But it's a part of the story, the "cultural" part, that I'm eager to see people trying to define and address, as you begin to in this post.)
Thanks, Chris! There is so much to say, but one question I have is this: will voters tire of the "the most important in our history" message? Will "the little boy who cried wolf" effect occur? Already, to a degree, I sense that voters are less responsive to the charge that DJT is a fascist who wants to reign in perpetuity because they have been hearing this criticism for years. Might the next presidential election be a bit less "OMG THE WORLD MAY END IF YOU VOTE WRONG"? I sure hope so.
When I taught federal government at community college (an extremely fulfilling endeavor BTW), the first question of the first day was "what is the first branch of government?". It won't take three guesses as to what the answer was. They thought it was the president. The rest of the course was emphasizing the powers of Congress and thereby, the powers of them, the voters. Mr. Kosar's article articulates the constitutional framework very well.
The other thing which I emphasized in my class and which is a very, very big problem is how the sidelining of Congress takes away the people's power to have a say in their own governance. Because of a lot of forces, which I mostly shorthand as "corporate thinking", Americans are starting to lose their own sense of agency. Throughout the course, I always, even when discussing the Executive and Judicial branches emphasized how Congress can override the actions of these two branches. And I emphasized how the people could make Congress do what it wants.
Here is the fulfilling part. When students trained by public schools which don't allow teachers to develop students' critical thinking skills, political campaigns which manipulate emotions like corporate marketers, and most of all by "journalism" that refuses to tell a complicated and nuanced story, they start thinking like docile peasants just waiting out their feudal lord's abuse. As they learn they have real power, the more excited they get. Then, it's just a matter of learning the process.
The great part about community college is these are the students (many of whom are adult learners) have experienced first hand the effects of congress not doing its job. They get it much faster than the suburban high school kids I also taught. Show everyday people of the ropes and stand back and watch.
Thank you! And thank you for teaching! Yeah, a lot of folks think the president is the prime mover. Excessive media coverage has encouraged this perception. I am delighted you are teaching students the powers of Congress and connecting it to their powers as voters. Wonderful! Too many Americans see no connection, which is one reason they disengage/quit voting and/or yell about DC.
I don’t teach anymore, but yes to all that.
The media/presidential inflation point is one of the most underappreciated structural problems in American governance — the mismatch between constitutional reality and public expectation creates a feedback loop that degrades both branches simultaneously. It's something I've written about at length, and it's rarely stated this clearly.
Congress reclaiming its authority is necessary and right. What I'd add from my own work: even a fully re-engaged Congress faces a capacity problem that resources alone don't close. Immigration and the budget aren't just politically difficult — they're design problems requiring sustained technical work that doesn't fit inside electoral cycles. The pattern of legislators preferring to campaign on issues rather than resolve them isn't cynicism — it's rational behavior inside a system that structurally rewards keeping problems alive over solving them. The incentive architecture selects for it.
Which points to a deeper gap. The design function for governance itself — building institutional architecture that makes complex solutions implementable and durable — has no professional home in our system. More staff and better tools are necessary but not sufficient. That's the structural layer underneath the capacity problem your work identifies.
100 percent. I have spent a decade studying congressional capacity and goading Congress to invest in itself.
And certainly our elections provide very limited incentives for legislators to tackle complex, high salience problems. It is easier to stir voters with rhetoric than to build a cross-partisan coalition that pushes durable reform forward.
A decade of that work shows — the capacity research is some of the most useful diagnostic material available. The incentive problem and the capacity problem feel related but I think they're distinct failure modes. Even if you fixed the electoral incentives tomorrow, Congress would still lack a professional function for designing solutions to problems of that complexity. Both need to be solved, probably in parallel.
Absolutely.
I agree. And that’s why we are screwed politically. At least Trump, despite many faults, is attempting to overturn some of the past travesty and move us forward. Except for Congress.