We need an effective Congress

From Debates Show How Much Obama’s Presidency Has Shrunk by Jonah Goldberg. His general thesis is that the narrative of Obama's successful presidency is under assault and has to a fair degree already collapsed. And the assault is coming from the left of his own party.

Separate from that argument, which I regard as mostly opinion and interpretation, there is this passage which resonated. Emphasis added.

Obama himself set his sights lower; he wanted to be the Democrats’ Ronald Reagan. And for a time, it seemed to many that he’d succeeded. As late as April of 2017, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria said, “Obama aspired to be a transformational president, like Reagan. At this point, it’s fair to say that he has succeeded.”

But this proved to be a mirage. As National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru observed in 2017, Obama left office almost as popular as Reagan, but when Reagan departed for California, he left his party stronger than when he found it, holding more elected offices at the federal and state level. And the public felt better about the direction of the country as well. By the time Obama left office, nearly 1,000 Democrats had lost their jobs, and the GOP was better positioned than at any time since the 1920s.

Some analysts plausibly argue that these statistics are unfairly inflated because they’re pegged to the large coattails Obama had in 2008. Even so, it demonstrates that Obama failed by his own standard insofar as transformational presidents expand and entrench their parties the way FDR and Reagan did.

In fairness, Reagan and FDR had an advantage that Obama did not: They were succeeded by allies. Since so much of what presidents do can be reversed by the next president, particularly when done by executive order — as Obama did for most of his presidency — it takes a new, friendly replacement to solidify a presidential legacy. Donald Trump reversed many of Obama’s policies with a stroke of a pen (just as a Democratic successor would do to Trump’s).

I agree. Obama was bad for the country but he was disastrous for the Democratic Party. He left them with no bench, hence the crowded field of farm-team mediocrities struggling for attention.

The bigger, and more important, issue is not the relative partisan strengths. It is the institutional erosion implied by the last sentence in the passage above. And no I don't mean the perfectly fine and necessary Electoral College.

I mean that Congress has ceded the entirety of its role to the pen-wielding executive branch and unaccountable regulatory agencies. Congress used to do the hard work of making trade-off decisions on budgets and crafted new legislation.

Now, instead, the establishment parties together just raise the debt ceiling and expand deficit spending. They don't have to make trade-off decisions. They just keep spending. They don't pass consequential legislation anymore either, other than to tidy up loose ends. Agencies write the regulations. The Executive branch interprets them. And Congress is left only as a forum for complaining. They have written themselves out of the field of play.

Reading the passage above from Goldberg brought that home. It read like accounts from England or Australia which are parliamentary systems. Whichever party wins the election is the dictator for that duration. They pass all sorts of new laws which might be 180 degrees from the prior parliament. Government by parliament can, and often has, functioned as government by executive order.

The strength of the American system has been the balance and tension between the independent courts, independent Congress (as the continuing voice of the people) and the independent Executive. When Congress carefully considers and publicly debates and finally writes and passes legislation, it functions as a voice of the people and constrains the executive. When Congress considers and publicly debates and makes the trade-off decisions for a prudent budget, it functions as a voice of the people and constrains the executive.

I do think Obama was an empty suit who was bad for the country. I do think Trump is a crude but, so far, effective executive.

But the system's strength should depend on its structure and not on the happenstance of individuals. By allowing Congress to become irrelevant, we have opened ourselves to the collapse of the designed checks-and-balances.

It used to matter less who took which office because there was such a strong safety net of checks and balances. Now, with an unchecked system, it matters completely who wins. The polarization arises from the unchecked system. If you win, you win everything. Just as in a parliamentary system. If you lose, you lose everything. No wonder the attacks are so sharp and even violent.

We need an effective Congress that is the voice of the people, the constraint on the pen-wielding Executive, and the institutional buffer to rash decisions.