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"A Constitutional Congress"--Christopher DeMuth in The Weekly Standard
By The James Wilson Institute •
Posted on Oct 17 2014
Christopher DeMuth, distinguished senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, delivered a talk on taming the executive state at our Fall 2014 Colloquium on the American Founding. His talk was the source of The Weekly Standard's cover story October 17th, 2014.
Some excerpts:
If Congress is to turn back presidential encroachments, it will first need to recover the arsenal of powers it has given up voluntarily. Today’s Republicans would seem to be ideally suited to the task with their fresh, Tea Party-inspired devotion to constitutionalism. But the task would put that devotion to the test, for Congress did not relinquish its powers by inadvertence but rather by calculation. Restoration will require a new political calculus and a new institutional culture.
Delegating lawmaking to the executive has been, not entirely but to a considerable extent, a means of shirking the legislative responsibility while retaining, and even increasing, the power and prerogatives of the individual member. In exchange for the burdens and risks of collective choice, the member becomes a solo practitioner with a public license—to influence the choices of a vast executive apparatus through grant-getting, letter-writing, regulatory tweaking, placing allies in agencies and at Washington lobbying firms, adding entrepreneurial riders and earmarks and line-items to blunderbuss spending bills, vowing to preserve or scuttle executive decisions before aroused constituency groups, and pell-mell personal fundraising.
A better division of labor between legislating and executing would be good for both branches and for the rest of us. These abstract meditations would quickly spring to life in practical politics if a Republican-led 114th Congress embarked on something like the following five-step plan for constitutional reconstruction: First, retrieve the recently relinquished borrowing, taxing, and spending authorities. Second, reinstitute the spending power. Third, regulate the regulators. Fourth, censure unconstitutional executive acts. Fifth, acknowledge executive strengths.
Read the whole piece here.