Tanned, rested and ready, Congress has returned from the August recess. It is unclear why.

The Democrats’ House and Senate minorities have no power — the ability to achieve intended effects. The Republican majorities have no power because they are not permitted intention independent of this president’s preferences.

He refuses to enforce the law that strictly required the TikTok app to be sold or banned, at the latest, by April. He believes Congress’s spending power is merely the power to suggest spending ceilings. 

Try to cite a long-standing tenet of conservatism he has not traduced. Federalism? To end voting by mail and impose voter identification requirements, he would truncate, by executive order, the states’ constitutionally enumerated power to conduct elections. 

He would commandeer state and local governments with an executive order banning no-cash bail. Free markets? See “state capitalism,” below.

The Constitution’s architecture presupposes legislative and executive powers not merely separated but somewhat rivalrous. “Ambition,” wrote James Madison, “must be made to counteract ambition.” 

The architecture collapses when, as today, the controlling ambition of most members of the congressional majorities is reelection requiring sycophancy toward today’s president. Individual and institutional pride have vanished, supplanted by unapologetic and undignified fear.

Hence, it is regrettable that last year Republicans captured Senate control. They said this would enable them to preserve the filibuster, which prevents enactment of large measures on slender and entirely partisan majorities. 

Instead, Senate Republicans have advanced the president’s agenda — the sliver of it requiring legislative action rather than executive fiats — by a parliamentary maneuver (reconciliation) that evades the filibuster.

Absent a Republican Senate majority, these Cabinet members (among other wreckers masquerading as reformers) would be absent: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard. 

The confirmation of each required abject deference to presidential discretion that precludes independent senatorial judgments concerning any nominee’s character and competence.

The Senate confirmed, 50-49, the president’s former criminal defense attorney, Emil Bove, to a federal appellate court, on the threshold of the Supreme Court. His jurisprudential thinking, if any, is unknown. 

His coarseness is not: When the acting United States attorney at Manhattan resigned to protest the Trump administration’s dropping, for political reasons, the corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams, Judge Bove’s thuggish reflex was to ominously threaten to “investigate” her.

Voters, remember Judge Bove next year. If a Supreme Court vacancy occurs before 2029, an invertebrate Republican Senate might mean a sullied court.

Presidents are mistakenly accorded vast discretion in foreign policy, so Congress can do little when today’s president, for no discernible strategic reason, uses insults and economic coercion to propel the most populous nation, India, into closer collaboration with the second most populous, China.

Congress could, however, inhibit this administration’s primary domestic policy.

It is frequently, and illogically, described as “state capitalism,” an oxymoron coined to avoid candidly calling it “socialism”: Government supplanting markets in the allocation of capital and, hence, of opportunity. Many business leaders in what should now be called “the quasi-private sector” have responded to presidential bullying with groveling.

Intel, say, has given the government a 10 percent interest in it. This dilutes the value of other shareholders’ portions of the company — an unconstitutional, because uncompensated, taking of property.

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick says the government might take stakes in defense companies such as Lockheed Martin, which he says is “basically an arm of the U.S. government.” 

If so, Congress should pass an “Arm-of-the-Government CEO Compensation Act,” stipulating: No executive of any company in which the government owns as much as 1 percent can receive total annual compensation exceeding in value the $162,672 paid for a GS-15 civil servant.

Half a century ago, Congress adopted budgeting rules it rarely obeys. They stipulate a timetable for presenting budget resolutions, and passing 12 appropriations bills by September 30.

Senator James Lankford, an Oklahoma Republican, proposes the Prevent Government Shutdown Act. When government funding lapses because Congress ignores its rules, a renewable 14-day continuing resolution would fund critical operations, but:

During the continuing resolution, members’ office funds cannot be used for travel other than a one-way trip back to Washington. No campaign funds can pay travel expenses. Neither the House nor the Senate can be adjourned for more than 23 hours, and mandatory midday quorum calls, seven days a week, will confirm members’ attendance.

Unlike the budgetary rules Congress pretends to have imposed on itself, Mr. Lankford’s law would be obeyed. Congress is tanned, rested and ready to resume its passivity.

The Washington Post