U.S. President Donald Trump at Kuala Lumpur Convention Centre on Sunday in Malaysia.Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
Where have you gone, members of the United States Congress? If the continuing Washington melodrama had a Simon and Garfunkel song for a soundtrack, the answer would be that the House of Representatives and the Senate in effect have “left and gone away.”
That verse in a hit song from 1968, another period of political tumult and social upheaval, offers a crisp and efficient assessment of contemporary American politics. Once again – it happened under Andrew Jackson, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – the executive branch is in the ascendancy and the legislative branch is in retreat.
But, in the case of the second term of President Donald Trump, Congress seems to be in a state of unilateral disarmament.
In fact, the House of Representatives hasn’t held anything but a brief pro forma meeting since the beginning of the government shutdown that now is past the three-week mark.
The eclipse of the power of Congress is a result of two separate elements of today’s politics that conspire to thrust the legislative branch into the role of little more than a feckless partner, if not a passive enabler, of the President.
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One is the Republican control of both chambers on Capitol Hill. The other is the apparent reluctance of those Republicans to assert congressional prerogatives, effectively handing the White House a political blank cheque.
That is in defiance of the U.S. Constitution and of a long-standing tradition of husbanding the powers that, since the ratification of the country’s founding governing document in 1789, have been the birthright of Congress.
The Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the power of the purse. It gives Congress, not the president, the power to regulate international trade except in cases of national emergency or egregious dangers to domestic industry. The authors of the legislation granting these presidential powers very likely did not envision the airing of a television advertisement by a Canadian province to qualify for the exemptions. In any case, courts repeatedly have declared many of the Trump tariffs illegal or unconstitutional.
Mr. Trump has seized several powers such as these without pushback from Capitol Hill – and has embarked on military adventures in the Caribbean without either authorization or quiet approbation from Congress.
Skepticism of unilateral presidential decisions in foreign and military policy has a long history. In 1848, a leading congressional critic of the expansionist president James K. Polk expressed his concern about executive overreach. “Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary,” representative Abraham Lincoln of Illinois wrote his law partner, William Herndon, in 1848, “and you allow him to make war at pleasure.”
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Some 177 years later, the shutdown of the American government has continued without meaningful congressional involvement.
“There is a passivity in Congress now that suggests that many of the Republicans are so aligned to Trump they feel they are now a de facto extension of the executive branch of government,” said Matthew Smith, a historian at Miami University’s Hamilton, Ohio, campus. “Under previous Republican administrations, there was always a sense that the Congress was at least proud of its prerogatives and wasn’t a rubber stamp for the presidency.”
Not always, however. Theodore Roosevelt asserted American control of Panama, later saying, “I took the Isthmus, started the canal and then left Congress not to debate the canal, but to debate me.” Richard Nixon – who later would argue, in direct contravention of clear language in the Constitution, that he had the right to withhold funds appropriated by Congress – said after decisively winning a second term in 1972 that he would not be a “supplicant” to Congress or even call a meeting with lawmakers, arguing, “We won the election. Let them come to me.”
In earlier high-water eras of the accumulation of executive powers, loud voices of frustration and protest issued forth from Capitol Hill.
Because his tenure was so long – 57 years in the House and Senate – they often came from Robert Byrd of West Virginia, who carried a copy of the Constitution in the fiery red vests of his business suits and who corrected colleagues and correspondents alike by insisting that he served not under 11 presidents but with 11 presidents.
“Senator Byrd believed in the branches being co-equal,” Raymond Smock, the former official historian of the House of Representatives and the director emeritus of the Robert C. Byrd Center for Congressional History and Education at West Virginia’s Shepherd University, said in an interview. “He fiercely defended the powers of Congress. If he were around today he’d be giving floor speeches telling people of how Congress’s powers were being appropriated by the President. He’d be raising hell.”
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Mr. Byrd, the longest-serving senator in history, died at 92 in 2010, but not before reminding his colleagues that the decline of the Roman Senate led to the decline of Ancient Rome itself. “Why so deferential to presidents?” he asked during a series of memorized history lectures he delivered in the Senate chamber 21 years ago. “How many of us know that the executive branch is but the equal of the legislative branch, not above it?”
That lesson apparently hasn’t been learned by current lawmakers. But it isn’t only the legislative branch that has been relatively quiescent. So, too, the third of the co-equal branches, the judiciary.
“The Supreme Court has been reluctant to engage in questions about the broadening powers of the executive branch,” said Thomas Barnico, who teaches at the Boston College Law School. “It hasn’t examined whether legislative power has been curtailed and questioned whether some of these actions are constitutional.”
Mr. Trump is unwittingly endorsing a thesis proffered by Charles de Gaulle.
“A constitution is a spirit, institutions and a practice,” the French president said in 1964. “But it must also be understood that the indivisible authority of the state is entrusted entirely to the president by the people who elected him, that there exists no other, neither ministerial, civil, military, judicial, which is not conferred and maintained by him.”
Mr. Trump, however, is purely American. And the situation that prevails in Washington is a pure distillation of the Trump view of government.
By not responding, Republicans in Congress are endorsing that view, forgetting that when power eventually shifts to the Democrats they will find virtue in the words of Mr. Byrd and may find themselves in the uncomfortable position of speaking of the decline of the Roman Senate and quoting, with unabashed irony and in powerful approval, the late Democratic senator from West Virginia.