By George Will
Saturday, September 09, 2017
’Congress has been
dropping in relative power along a descending curve of 60 years’ duration, with
the rate of fall markedly increased since 1933. . . . The fall of the American
Congress seems to be correlated with a more general historical transformation
toward political and social forms within which the representative assembly —
the major political organism of post-Renaissance Western civilization — does
not have a primary political function.” – James Burnham, “Congress and the
American Tradition” (1959)
Today, worse is better. The president’s manifest and
manifold inadequacies might awaken a slumbering Congress to the existence of
its Article I powers and responsibilities.
As a candidate, Donald Trump vowed devotion to all twelve
of the Constitution’s seven articles. As president, Barack Obama, discerning a
defect in the work of the 1787 Constitutional Convention, supplied Article
VIII, which has expired. It stipulated: “Between Jan. 20, 2009, and Jan. 20,
2017, the president shall have the power to do whatever Congress declines to
do.” So, when Congress did not confer legal status on “Dreamers” (immigrants
brought to America illegally as children), he did it. He conferred such status
and attendant benefits on a large category of people and called this patently
legislative act a routine exercise of law-enforcement discretion.
When Trump was a candidate, his policy regarding Dreamers
made up in concision what it lacked in reflection: “They have to go.” As a
president whose incoherence has a kind of majesty, he says he has “a love for
these people” who are “incredible” when they are not engaged in rampant
criminality. When he is not pardoning Arizona’s scofflaw sheriff Joe Arpaio for
his anti-immigrant criminality, Trump casts immigration as a law-and-order
issue.
So does Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who preaches
fire-and-brimstone law and order when he is not encouraging legalized theft
under “civil forfeiture,” whereby government enriches itself by seizing the
property of persons not convicted of crimes. Sessions, whose canine loyalty to
Trump is not scrupulously reciprocated, seemed to relish the privilege of announcing
Trump’s policy that, absent action from a Congress that is especially loath to
act on immigration, could punish 800,000 children for what their parents did
long ago.
Trump’s policy now is to state that Obama’s policy will
expire in six months unless Congress chooses to “legalize” — Trump’s word — it.
If Congress does not, Trump will do . . .
something: “I will revisit this issue!” Perhaps his exclamatory
punctuation foreshadows something as forceful, meaning as unilateral, as what
Obama did.
What Obama did was popular and unconstitutional. The
latter attribute probably does not interest Obama’s successor, but the former
attribute evidently does. Hence Trump has sent this hot-potato issue where it
belongs, to Congress, which now faces the unaccustomed agony of actually
setting national policy.
The day that Trump and Sessions disturbed Congress’s
serenity, Nikki Haley did likewise. The U.S ambassador to the U.N. and a former
executive (as South Carolina’s governor) intimated that the 2015 nuclear agreement
with Iran might yet wind up where, constitutionally, it should have started —
in the national legislature. An international pact of this complexity and
gravity should have been a treaty, submitted to the Senate for committee
hearings, floor debate, and ratification by a two-thirds supermajority.
Instead, as a redundant expression of Obama’s disdain for Congress and the
separation of powers, it was submitted to the U.N., and then to Congress. The
House voted disapproval and the Senate attempted the same, although the margins
were too small to override an Obama veto in any case.
Haley suggested that Trump might declare that Iran is not
in compliance with the agreement, thereby initiating a 60-day congressional
review, potentially culminating in the administration’s leaving Congress to
decide for or against U.S. withdrawal from the agreement. Just as many
Republicans, after years of denouncing Obamacare, flinched from repealing it,
many critics of the Iran agreement might flinch. Haley said, “I get that Congress
doesn’t want this.” Which is a reason — exercising atrophied institutional
sinews — for hoping it happens.
In 1959, before the exhilarating experience of Ronald
Reagan’s presidency, congressional supremacy was still a tenet of conservatism.
Then James Burnham, a founding editor of the then four-year-old National Review, wondered whether
Congress could “survive as an autonomous, active political entity with some
measure of real power, not merely as a rubber stamp, a name and a ritual, or an
echo of powers lodged elsewhere.” The slope of the long-descending curve might
be changing.
No comments:
Post a Comment