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Comment by dmix

5 hours ago

That’s the history of separation of powers, the judiciary is the final check in the loop. It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.

That’s not to say states have lost power, their reach has also grown exponentially far outpacing even the federal in terms of number of workers and written law.

It’s mostly just Congress has become self satisfied on being negotiators for spending the most money in their own states, while ignoring the minimization of their role in the greater power dynamic.

Everyone makes a big deal about president as the signal but IMO if you take a 10,000-foot view of US history Congress neutering itself is the real long term narrative. Including most major current populist issues like immigration, debt, war, abortion, etc. They are hands off unless it involves new spending.

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dmix

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vkou  5 hours ago

> It doesn’t fully explain why Congress has allowed the expansion of executive power for nearly a century, resulting in more and more major issues being pushed to the Supreme Court.

It's because the US is a presidential republic with no concept of a non-confidence vote. This makes the sitting head of the party ~impossible to remove, and when government fails to reach consensus, instead of... Having an election, and let the voters decide, power de-facto ends up in the hands of the executive.

  • reliabilityguy  4 hours ago

    I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties.

    • skissane  3 hours ago

      > I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties.

      But why are there only two parties?

      The rest of the Anglosphere–Australia, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK–have multiparty systems–some are more multiparty than others, but none of them have the hard two-party system that the US has, in which third parties have a very marginal role (not completely marginal – e.g. in a close election, the decisions of New York's Conservative and Working Families parties can make a real difference to the outcome – but certainly at a national level third parties have no real power in the US.)

      First-past-the-post is a popular explanation, but it can't by itself explain it, since the UK and Canada use it, yet lack a US-style hard two party system (and with the rise of the Reform party in the UK, the British system is becoming less two-party than it has been in a long time.)

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