As I’ve argued repeatedly, Congress is a shell of its former self.
In last Sunday’s Washington Post, Paul Kane made the same point specifically with respect to Congress’s upper chamber. He wrote:
"The Senate tasked with holding President Trump’s impeachment trial would be unrecognizable to most of its predecessors … By almost every measure, today’s Senate is the least deliberative in the modern era of a chamber that bills itself as the world’s greatest deliberative body."
Congress’s weakness threatens liberty because it reflects a breakdown of the Constitution’s structural check on overbearing government. In modern America, policy flows from regulatory agencies known in the aggregate as the “administrative state.” From 1995 to 2017, the executive branch issued over 92,000 rules, compared to 4,400 laws enacted by Congress.
Over the last forty years, alas, Congress abandoned oversight of the agencies it had legislated into existence. Meanwhile, the president’s grip over administrative policymaking tightened with each successive administration.
With Congress M.I.A., the president has become the policymaker‐in‐chief at the head of the administrative state. Indeed, the presidency has become so powerful that one of the two parties in Congress—roughly half the legislature—loses interest in executive overreach whenever “their guy” occupies the White House.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/how-make-congress-great-again
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