An Ornamental Congress

Is Congress fulfilling its constitutional duty? I fear not. And so the well-being of our republic is at risk.

The Constitution is clear: Congress is the preeminent branch of the federal government. The powers of the legislative branch are listed in Article One of the Constitution, while the powers of the president and the executive branch are listed in Article Two. (The judiciary is in Article Three.)

This sequencing was deliberate -- the legislature first. And so, for example, Congress has the power to impeach and remove the president but not vice versa. So yes, the three branches are equal, but Congress is first among the equals. That was the intention of James Madison and George Washington, as well as all the other authors and ratifiers of our founding document.

You see, what the authors of the Constitution feared most was tyranny: a single tyrant in the mode of King George III, whom they had just overthrown. So Madison and Washington -- both themselves future presidents -- were firm: The legislature, that collective body drawn from all over the country, must be preeminent. It would check the power of the presidency.

To be sure, the Founders knew the problem of committees, those slow-moving beasts. But they most feared the danger of dictators -- those fast-moving beasts. So given the choice between decentralization and centralization, they chose the former -- they put Congress in the lead.

Consider: Congress is endowed with the power to make war, which stands at the commanding heights over all other powers. It was endowed with oversight power, casting sunshine on executive branch actions to deter maladministration or misconduct. It was endowed with the power to regulate interstate and foreign commerce to engineer the nation's economic fate. It was endowed with the power to coin money and regulate the money supply. And, perhaps most pertinent to our moment today, Congress was endowed with the power of the purse: the power to raise revenue through taxation or ... tariffs.

Yet all these mighty congressional powers have fallen into desuetude through disuse. The president, not Congress, has become the colossus. The president initiates combat without pausing to ask Congress for the constitutionally required declaration of war. Afghanistan one day. Iraq the next. Then Libya, Somalia and the Houthis in Yemen. Next in the queue are Panama, Greenland and possibly China over Taiwan or the South China Sea.

These extraconstitutional adventures -- some of them actual wars, some of them potential wars -- have proved extravagant fool's errands approaching a mind-boggling $10 trillion. Yet Congress has stood like an idle spectator, funding misadventure after misadventure without hearings or debate.

Once upon a time, Congress asserted its Article One powers: Sen. J. William Fulbright, Democrat of Arkansas, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, held hearings and exposed the folly of the Vietnam War, helping to bring that mistaken war to an end. But those hearings were almost 60 years ago. We've seen little of that sort of constitutionally mandated checking since.

The congressional powers over taxing and spending have also migrated to the White House. The migration is in the daily headlines. The duumvirate of President Donald Trump and uncrowned Elon Musk decide which congressionally created agencies and programs to fund or close without confronting proper congressional pushback. So the Impoundment Control Act of 1974, intended to check and restrain the spending power of the executive branch, is flouted with impunity. Moreover, Congress has surrendered to the president the power to raise revenues through punitive tariffs. All the president needs to do is intone "national emergency," and presto, the president can impose tariffs willy-nilly on friend or foe alike at whatever level fits this day's economic whim. Congress is a bystander to the economic convulsions underway courtesy of Trump's uncharted tariff agenda.

The federal budget has spiraled to more than $7 trillion annually, with trillion-dollar deficits as far as the eye can see. The national debt is racing toward an unfathomable $50 trillion with annual carrying costs exceeding the bloated Pentagon budget that has never passed an audit. Congress fiddles while the nation plunges into insolvency. No hearings. No budget-tightening legislation. Regularly dodging the financial bullet through trillion-dollar continuing resolutions that delay the day of reckoning by kicking the can down the road. Sleepwalking off a financial cliff. For every $1 trillion the federal government spends, Congress spends a minuscule fraction to prevent fraud, waste or lawlessness. If Congress were doing its job, Musk and his musketeers would be superfluous.

It might seem strange that Congress would willingly surrender its constitutional predominance to the president -- be that Trump or anyone else. After all, political theory presumes that institutions will fiercely defend their own powers and prerogatives. But that presumption has given way to partisan politics, to loyalty to the chief. And so Republicans in Congress are bowing down to Trump. If this continues, Congress will not be the first branch of the federal government -- it will be the ornamental branch, just a bauble with a pretty building on Capitol Hill.

So who will stand up for the Constitution? Who will stand up for the American people? On the answers to those questions rests the fate of our republic.

Armstrong Williams is manager/sole owner of Howard Stirk Holdings I & II Broadcast Television Stations and the 2016 Multicultural Media Broadcast owner of the year. To find out more about him and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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