Comment by ethbr1
7 days ago
> Today, congress can be largely ignored by the executive and congress seems to support it vocally.
I seem to remember the 116th and 118th Congresses pushing back against executive power, which were the last times the US had divided government. https://history.house.gov/Institution/Presidents-Coinciding/...
And I wouldn't exactly say that Congress is wholly supporting unrestricted presidential power currently either. E.g. Senator Thune continually shooting down Trump's more oddball pleas.
There are very vocal supporters of the president in both the House and Senate GOP caucuses, but they're not the majority.
I think the strongest version of your argument would be something like 'In recent US Congressional history, both parties when in power have used congressional power to tactically check opposition party presidents, but neither have sought to permanently expand and defend the bounds of congressional power.'
Wouldn’t a functioning congress have resisted the executive aborbing its powers? After all, congress was supposed to be the most powerful branch. For good reason.
> congress was supposed to be the most powerful branch
Just re-read the USA constitution. Despite much effort, I did not find any "power rankings" of the three branches. Please point me in the right direction.
It was written before Dragonball Z existed so they didn't have the convenient framework of "power level" to use. Instead the power of Congress is indicated by the fact that all acts of the government are derived from bills originating in Congress, which the president rubber stamps (or not, which congress can then override), and the supreme court judicially interprets - but only if someone brings suit.
Now the president can do police actions and stuff but it seems like the intention was congress being the branch that had independent autonomy to just do things and get the ball rolling.
Congress sets the president's salary and has the power to fire him. The president has no such reverse power. The legislative branch is clearly the more powerful. "co-equal" is a fiction made up out of whole cloth by Nixon to further his criminal activities.
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Obviously the one which sets the law, also the one which has first article dedicated to it.
Really? You read the constitution and managed to not absorb how the system is structured?
Hint: Look at who has which powers. Congress has the power to check every other branch. Neither the President nor the courts have symmetrical power over Congress. This asymmetry reflects its position.
I must admit I am a bit flabbergasted. How can you not understand what you read? And if a portion of Hacker News users, who are likely to have above average cognitive ability, don’t understand this, how poorly does the rest of the population understand the core ideas of how their political system works?
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