For Congress' part, they did pass laws that make a lot of what Trump is doing now with impoundment of congressional funds, and firing inspectors general explicitly illegal. He's doing it anyway.
But the reason Trump is able to do what he's doing now comes down to the structure of the DOJ being an executive branch he controls. Combined with his immunity from SCOTUS. This means he can argue anything he does isn't a crime, no one will investigate or prosecute him, and he can pardon anyone acting in his direction / direct his DOJ to not prosecute them.
Nothing Biden or Democrats could do about this, because at the end of the day, Republicans decided they deserve this power, and they grabbed it for themselves. It was always there for the taking, they just needed to convince themselves with words and court decisions and speeches that they had the right.
I think with some amount of imagination, they could have done something about it.
Might be a good thing that it would enable society to change faster because bureaucrats are slow to respond.
Then again, might not be the welcome change we want.
If they see themselves first as Members of Congress, then they should try to seek more power for Congress, not for their parties.
> requires a candidate for President or Vice President to provide copies of tax returns for the 10 most recent taxable years to the Federal Election Commission.
> establishes a program to support states and localities transition to ranked choice voting systems.
While things that I support, it frustrates me that congress can't propose bills that are hyper focused on one issue.
Congress has slowly abdicated its power to the other two branches of government over the decades. As a consequence, it's become more and more performative over time. This reality ends up changing the type of people who even seek high office in the first place. Legislators get replaced by social media influencers.
At this point, congress is primarily a judge appointment machine.
And civic institutions that actually want to get things done, adjust accordingly. They spend less time drafting bills and lobbying congress, and more time fighting for change through the courts or by lobbying the executive directly.
The real elections for those seats happen in partisan primaries, where hyper-partisan ideologues are over represented. The electoral danger for most members of congress therefore comes from primary challengers catering to those ideological primary voters, and so incumbents have to defend their seats by being more partisan than the primary challengers. And so the partisanship keeps ratcheting up and up.
The Republican party has been totally consumed by this and is now just a hollowed out cult of personality. The only way most Republicans can keep their seats is through total loyalty to Trump. Otherwise they get primaried.
The extreme filibuster we have today also makes most legislation impossible - so the job of a member of congress has become more and more performative.
At the same time, the population as a whole is sorting itself into like minded enclaves. Red areas are getting redder and blue areas are getting bluer.
If we could somehow get rid of partisan primaries, the filibuster, and expand the house by several factors, we could improve the situation. But it's all so broken already, I don't know if we can get there.
Honestly, just fixing the absurd gerrymandering (on both sides) would help with this. In basically every other developed country the governments have no powers to draw the electoral boundaries, which seems to work better.
Doing something like expanding the house of representatives to several times it's current size would probably help much more.
All these things are a bit academic though, since neither policy is very feasible.
It always has been. Even back in Rome there were the plebeians and the patricians. Demagogues rose to power based on party lines, corruption grew, and then Rome fell.
What we are seeing today is what naturally happens when you fail to teach future leaders history, and instead they are taught, but this time it will be different.
The House passed this Act in 2021 to reduce the presidents power, but Biden never asked the senate to act on it. Reducing his own power wasn’t a priority for him, he spent his political capital on pushing for other laws.
The article alluded to a Republican filibuster as the barrier to passing the senate.