Congress as root cause of degeneration

From Ours to reason why by Richard Fernandez and referencing Is the Trump Administration Pivoting the Fight in Syria Toward a War with Iran? by Seth Harp.

All of this instigated by the decision this past week to remove American forces from Syria. Those who were against wars in foreign lands are now all for this one now putting them in bed with those advocating for continuing foreign interventions. And yet what have all the foreign affairs and military strategy experts accomplished for America in the past couple of decades? It is not clear that their track record is all that recommending to their expertise.

But what sparked my attention was wording by Fernandez in a particular paragraph.

Perhaps more people than were ever aware of the combat presence in Syria are outraged the US is leaving it and that is a good thing. The lack of awareness was the result of the breakdown of the national security debate and the abdication by Congress of its role in war making. The public is now like a man waking up in a strange city with a 3 week growth of beard with no memory of how he got there.

Sure the media choosing not to focus on Syria plays into the lack of public awareness.

But "the abdication by Congress of its role in war making" is what resonated. It goes beyond war-making. We have gone years without Congress creating a federal budget and they only recently began doing that again, albeit badly. Managing the nation's finances, the indisputable purview of Congress, has been disastrous for more than a decade. Legislation? Can you think of any important legislation in the past decade which 1) didn't fail disastrously, 2) didn't involve giving away money to special interests, 3) wasn't related to fixing earlier legislative disasters? More critically, can you think of any legislation which has been demonstratively beneficial to the nation? Regulation? Don't get me started. Congress has delegated virtually all regulatory decision-making to largely unmanaged and unaccountable government agencies due to the Chevron deference.

It is common to bewail polarization and the failure of democracy and this is frequently laid at the feet of an activist court or purportedly tyrannical presidents (of either party). I think the problem is both far less of an issue than it is made out to be and the solution is pretty straight-forward.

Congress is the branch intended to be closest to the will of the American people (for good or ill). But it is decades since we have had such a Congress. The Congresses we have had for a long time have been uninterested in constraining the Executive branch; have been more interested in scoring partisan points; have not wanted to do the exceptionally hard work of crafting clear legislation solving real problems when the solutions are both uncertain and damaging to some parts of the electorate; have been happy to delegate onerous regulation making to unaccountable bureaucrats; and have been far more interested in raising their societal standing and advancing their professional careers and feathering their financial beds than they have been in serving the interests and needs of the American people.

Fix Congress's attention on America and their constituents and perhaps we could make much better progress and our commonweal would be working more closely to how it was intended.