Frustrated lawmakers are looking to 2026 in the hopes that they can reclaim some of the power many fear they’ve ceded to the White House under Trump.
Over the course of 2025, the Trump administration unilaterally shuttered or drastically weakened federal agencies, implemented widespread tariffs, canceled congressionally approved spending and conducted military operations in the Caribbean.
Democrats repeatedly cried foul, and even some Republicans aired concerns about the White House brushing aside Congress. Scores of lawmakers opted for retirement before the calendar even turned to January.
Now many are wondering whether anything will be different next year, especially with the added political pressure of the approaching midterm elections.
I now think that anything Congress does to cede its authority to anything should be inherently unconstitutional.
Congresspeople on the day they first walk into office have less power than most people probably expect. They don’t sit on committees. It’s difficult to introduce legislation. Many of the important bills they vote on are giant monsters of bills and they have no option except to vote along party lines.
So individual congresspeople are put into a this conundrum. If they want to benefit their constituents, they have to play along with their party leadership. If the executive branch has too much power over the party, as Trump does, due to his controlling all the money, then essentially, the executive branch controls Congress.
We need to get rid of all of this ceding of power not just to the executive branch but also to anything else, like political parties, or even to rules of order, like how the filibuster works today. There are all sorts of ways that Congress today has less power than specified in the constitution.
The legislative branch ceding power to the executive branch is already unconstitutional. The biggest problem with Trump is not that the terrible things he does are legal, it’s that no one is willing to enforce the law and stop him. Without a way to enforce them the words written on dusty pieces of paper are completely irrelevant.
The same reason why…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yKf40CLF9MU
Constitutionality is a meaningless concept in US political system. It can’t be established or enforced in any way.
Of course it can be enforced, and was planned to be enforced from its inception. All three branches were designed to have a hand in enforcing it. The legislative branch in creating laws to enforce it, the judicial branch to adjudicate it, and to a lesser extent, the executive branch. It was all enforced from the beginning.
If you’re saying that a conspiracy of government officials can choose to ignore the constitution, and that’s the reason why it can’t be enforced, then that’s true for every government’s constitution.
No, I’m saying that new constitutional theory was created that lets political and judicial leaders interpret the rules any way they like. The document itself is meaningless now and as such can’t be enforced. Any accusation of something being unconstitutional is countered by different interpretation of the same laws and there’s no independent, impartial body to say which one is correct.
So in practice the legislative branch creates any laws they want, the partisan judicial branch finds some creative interpretation of the constitution that legitimizes them and the executive is forced to follow them. The Supreme Court has on many occasion invented completely new laws claiming that they are somehow defined by the constitution and even reversed it’s ruling later interpreting it in the opposite way. The majority is free to decide what the constitution says and the document itself is useless now.
Surely those sorts of things could happen in any country. There’s no constitution that is inherently more than just words on paper.
But it is not happening in many other countries. In most modern democracies the judiciary is independent and interprets the constitution faithfully because trying to weaken it doesn’t serve it interests. Unlike US constitution, most modern constitutions are also written in contemporary language that has specific, legal meaning and can’t be reinterpreted freely. In most countries there are no alternative theories about what the people that wrote the document really meant or how the system is designed work. Most of those issues are specific to US. And I’m only saying “most” because I don’t know the situation in all other modern democracies but I’m not aware of any other system which is as broken as the one in US and is still considered a democracy.