The Future of Congressional Supremacy

[EasyAce]

By George F. Will
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/451219/barack-obama-donald-trump-congress-future-congressional-supremacy

Today, worse is better. The president’s manifest and manifold inadequacies might awaken a slumbering
Congress to the existence of its Article I powers and responsibilities.

As a candidate, Donald Trump vowed devotion to all twelve of the Constitution’s seven articles. As president,
Barack Obama, discerning a defect in the work of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, supplied Article VIII,
which has expired. It stipulated: “Between Jan. 20, 2009, and Jan. 20, 2017, the president shall have the
power to do whatever Congress declines to do.” So, when Congress did not confer legal status on “Dreamers”
(immigrants brought to America illegally as children), he did it. He conferred such status and attendant
benefits on a large category of people and called this patently legislative act a routine exercise of law-
enforcement discretion.

When Trump was a candidate, his policy regarding Dreamers made up in concision what it lacked in reflection:
“They have to go.” As a president whose incoherence has a kind of majesty, he says he has “a love for these
people” who are “incredible” when they are not engaged in rampant criminality. When he is not pardoning
Arizona’s scofflaw sheriff Joe Arpaio for his anti-immigrant criminality, Trump casts immigration as a law-
and-order issue . . .

. . . What Obama did was popular and unconstitutional. The latter attribute probably does not interest Obama’s
successor, but the former attribute evidently does. Hence Trump has sent this hot-potato issue where it belongs,
to Congress, which now faces the unaccustomed agony of actually setting national policy . . .

. . . In 1959, before the exhilarating experience of Ronald Reagan’s presidency, congressional supremacy was
still a tenet of conservatism. Then James Burnham, a founding editor of the then four-year-old National Review,
wondered whether Congress could “survive as an autonomous, active political entity with some measure of real
power, not merely as a rubber stamp, a name and a ritual, or an echo of powers lodged elsewhere.” The slope
of the long-descending curve might be changing.

[EasyAce]

Note: Mr. Will quoted from Burnham's 1959 book, Congress and the American Tradition, from which he
drew another quote to tack at the top of his column:

Congress has been dropping in relative power along a descending curve of
60 years’ duration, with the rate of fall markedly increased since 1933. . . . The
fall of the American Congress seems to be correlated with a more general historical
transformation toward political and social forms within which the representative
assembly — the major political organism of post-Renaissance Western civilization
— does not have a primary political function.

If you haven't read Congress and the American Tradition, you can find copies in fine condition through
Amazon. It's a remarkable book by a thinker normally remembered for his writings on foreign policy and
international affairs, particularly The Struggle for the World, The Coming Defeat of Communism,
and Suicide of the West.

[IsailedawayfromFR]

Although I agree that there are negative ramifications in Congress in abdicating its responsibilities in favor of the other two branches, I believe that the erosion of the power of the sovereign states is even more important.  Yielding to a central, federal authority in increasing areas is not good.

The combined power of the states holds the ultimate authority in this country.  Wielding that power, they can accomplish anything, including the dissolution of Congress, the removal of the President, and the firing of the Supreme Courts.