Gene Healy: Has Congress become useless?

Has Congress become “a useless appendix on the governmental structure”? That was what then-Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Sen. J. William Fulbright, D-Ark., feared in 1968, according to newly released transcripts from the committee’s closed-session debates over Vietnam. Unless Congress was willing to assert itself on the war, he said, “I do not see how we have any real function.”

Last week found Congress once again doing a good imitation of a vestigial organ, as the House forked over $37 billion more for our endless Afghan adventure. Maybe if we called it “armed community organizing” instead of “nation building,” more Republicans would be against it.