There is a quiet crisis unfolding in our constitutional system, one that goes to the heart of whether we remain a self-governing people. The framers designed Congress as the first branch: Article I of the Constitution. It’s the body of our federal government that is closest to the citizenry, charged with the hard, deliberative work of writing the laws that shape our national life. It was designed to be the primary mover in our government. Congress creates executive agencies and even lower courts. It can remove members of the other branches, too, but neither the executive nor the judiciary can remove members of Congress. The other branches (in theory) can act only within the bounds of whatever Congress has chosen.
Yet over time, Congress has steadily handed away its authority. The reasons for this dereliction of duty mostly have to do with the competing forces of the accountability associated with representative government and the desire by many politicians to make their careers lifelong ventures. Why make hard calls and compromise on important issues — possibly imperiling your reelection — when you can foist those decisions onto the other branches? As a result, questions that properly belong to the people’s representatives—questions about the meaning of citizenship, the integrity of our elections, the limits of national sovereignty, when life begins, or the nature of marriage — are increasingly decided by courts and the executive branch rather than by those we elect to deliberate and decide.
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This is not how a healthy republic functions. When the legislative branch declines to act with clarity and courage, the judiciary and the executive step into the vacuum. The executive branch is meant to execute the law, not make it in the first instance. Judges, however able and well-intentioned, were never meant to serve as policymakers of last resort. They interpret the law. They do not create it. When Congress shirks its responsibility to define the boundaries of our political community or to secure the basic conditions of free and fair elections, others are left to fill the gap. When it is the courts, the result is policy frozen in judicial amber, removed from the give-and-take of democratic debate and placed beyond the reach of ordinary citizens and their elected officials. When the executive does this, the result is a policy subject to the whims of district court judges, and likely to be overturned by the next ideologically opposed administration, creating great uncertainty and wild swings in policy.
This is no way to run a country. Foundational matters of self-rule cannot be treated as legal technicalities rather than as living questions for a free people to settle through their elected representatives. Congress has the tools it needs to force accountability and produce legislation: open debate, amendment, negotiation, and even the disciplined use of Senate procedure. Yet too often, those tools are left unused. The result is a quiet transfer of power from the people’s House and Senate to the courts and the president, and from democratic responsibility to judicial finality and the administrative state.
This abdication carries real costs. A nation that cannot use the legislature to define when life begins and ends, or protect the integrity of its own elections, eventually loses the capacity to govern itself. Sovereignty is not merely a matter of territory. It is a matter of shared commitment and the authority of the people to set the terms of their common life. When those terms are settled by litigation rather than legislation, something essential is lost.
The remedy is not complicated, though it requires political will. Congress must reclaim the authority it has allowed to drift away. It must return to the business of legislating — clearly, specifically, and with the patience that genuine deliberation demands. That means bringing important measures to the floor for consideration, allowing debate, forcing opponents to defend their positions in public, and working through the hard process of compromise. The Senate’s rules, if properly used, were designed precisely for this purpose: to slow the rush of temporary majorities and compel serious engagement. They are not an excuse for inaction, but rather a framework for responsibility. We, the people, must understand that our members of Congress are sent to Washington to do the hard work of legislating. It is not easy to get legislation passed, and that is the point of our constitutional order. We have to stop expecting courts and presidents to solve national problems and place that expectation where it belongs: with Congress.
I have spent much of my life studying systems — how they function when healthy, and how they fail when one part stops performing its role. In the human body, when a vital organ ceases to do its work, the rest of the system compensates in ways that eventually produce greater harm. Our constitutional order is no different. When Congress declines to legislate on the great questions of self-government, the other branches expand to fill the space. The result is imbalance, and imbalance breeds distrust.
The people understand this instinctively. They elect representatives to act, not to defer. They expect their government to secure the vote, protect the border, define the rights and obligations of citizenship, and do so through the ordinary processes of republican government. Those expectations are reasonable. They are also constitutional.
AMERICA HAS MADE TREASON AFFORDABLE AGAIN
It is time for Congress to do its job. Reclaim the legislative power. Debate openly. Pass clear statutes. Restore the balance the framers intended. Only then can we begin to heal the quiet erosion of self-government and ensure that the next generation inherits a republic still capable of governing itself.
That work belongs to the people’s representatives. It always has.