You Can’t Replace Congress with the President

In today’s American political system, the president is the unquestioned leader. But this was not how the framers of the Constitution envisioned the government would function. Over time, the president’s powers have outstripped those of Congress, with the legislature relegated to the role of little more than a spectator. Correcting this lopsided system is possible, but it requires revisiting our founders’ original vision—a framework from which our current system has strayed dramatically.

America’s founders saw Congress as the first branch of the government. After all, it writes the law, and because a republic, as John Adams put it,” is an “Empire of Laws, and not of men,” Congress would necessarily be preeminent. While the president and the courts play an important role, respectively enforcing and interpreting the law, they were, of necessity, in secondary positions. Congress was always intended to be the republic’s keystone.

While it was understood that the president might offer encouragement in the State of the Union address or exercise restraint with a veto, ultimately it was Congress’s duty to transform public will into law. In its early years, Congress was likewise the center of the national political debate, with newspapers often reprinting speeches from the House of Representatives on the important issues of the day.

Congress was always intended to be the republic’s keystone.

The judiciary remained secondary too. Though the Supreme Court established the power of judicial review in Marbury v. Madison (1803), it did not strike down another federal law until 1857. Instead, Chief Justice John Marshall focused on establishing federal supremacy over state governments.

With a constitution that clearly favors the legislature and early traditions reinforcing congressional superiority, how did we get to the point we are at today, when the president seemingly reigns supreme? It did not happen all at once, but in fits and starts.

The story spans more than a century—from roughly Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828 until the Cold War of the 1940s. And while the narrative is complicated and hardly a straight line, several major developments, domestic and global, stand out in tracing the presidency’s triumph over the legislature.

In the second half of the 19th century, rampant corruption cast a shadow over Congress. From incidents involving tariff policy, economic regulation, executive appointments, and even pensions for Civil War veterans, it became clear to many reformers that Congress was not doing the public’s bidding. Public ire increasingly focused on industrial business conglomerates, often known as the “trusts,” that wielded outsize influence in the process, especially in the Senate. The tycoons who dominated the railroad, oil, steel, and even sugar trusts used their immense wealth to effectively purchase members of Congress, ensuring that their interests were secured over and above the public’s.

As confidence in Congress fell, the democratization of the presidency forged a tighter connection between the executive branch and the people. This lent the president a moral authority that, in the founding intention behind the Electoral College, was lacking. Jackson’s victory in 1828 was the first in which the public took a decisive role, but it took decades for a truly democratic presidency to form. Party conventions determined presidential nominees, and after the Civil War, political machines dominated these proceedings by distributing patronage to ensure loyalty to the bosses’ dictates.

As confidence in Congress fell, the democratization of the presidency forged a tighter connection between the executive branch and the people.

It was not until the election of Grover Cleveland, who Democrats nominated in 1884 despite his opposition to the powerful Tammany Hall political machine, that a truly independent president began to emerge. Presidents Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson followed in Cleveland’s footsteps, asserting their personal independence from the corrupt machines that usually controlled presidential politics. But the real breakthrough came with Franklin D. Roosevelt, whose tenure destroyed many of the machines that had dominated presidential nominations. Increasingly thereafter, the president could claim to have risen to the position not through backroom deals but by the expression of popular support. The president has thus become a kind of tribune, claiming to speak for the people and demanding other institutions follow their instructions.

The massive expansion in regulatory and foreign policy authority in the mid-20th century was another key development in the growth of presidential power. Roosevelt’s New Deal dramatically expanded government control over the economy. This enhanced presidential power because it was policy experts in the executive bureaucracy, rather than politicians in Congress, who had the knowledge capable of overseeing the private sector. Congress often wrote vague laws that did little more than enshrine broad policy goals, leaving the details to bureaucrats, who would ultimately report to the president.

Meanwhile, the Cold War that followed World War II precipitated a dramatic change in American foreign policy, as the United States abandoned its historic isolationism to become the leader of the free world. This also enhanced presidential power and further entrenched Americans’ view of the president as the embodiment of the national interest. The commander in chief’s constitutional prerogatives in foreign affairs were already so vast that, as America’s role in world affairs increased, so did the president’s authority.

These trends have subsequently inverted the original constitutional schema. As the founders saw it, the president was to be the choice of political elites, tasked mainly with recommending policies to Congress, checking its excesses through the veto, and enforcing the laws written by Congress. Now, the people choose the president and expect him or her to craft policy for the public good, often against the other branches’ parochial or corrupt demands. The rise of presidential power is thus a republican solution to a republican problem, in which the presidency became the institution to secure popular control over government. This was in no small part because the body originally assigned that task—Congress—has abdicated its role through ineffectiveness and corruption. Nevertheless, the framework that exists today creates at least as many problems as it solves.

The rise of presidential power is thus a republican solution to a republican problem, in which the presidency became the institution to secure popular control over government.

By centralizing authority so heavily, the United States has rejected a fundamental governing principle upon which it was originally founded: the separation of powers. As the French philosopher Montesquieu wrote in The Spirit of the Laws, a work that heavily influenced the Constitution’s framers, combining the executive and legislative means “there is no liberty, because one can fear that the same monarch . . . that makes tyrannical laws will execute them tyrannically.” Likewise, John Adams once noted, “Every project has been found to be no better than committing the lamb to the custody of the wolf, except that one which is called a balance of power.” (Emphasis in original.) As our country’s founders saw clearly, giving the president the right to create and enforce the law is a power highly liable to catastrophic abuse in ways that threaten the foundation of the republic itself.

Moreover, it is only in the legislature that all major factions in society can have their views taken into consideration. The president is just a signal individual who can, at best, reflect but a portion of the country. Those outside the president’s political coalition can do little except bide their time until their side is in control. But a properly functioning legislature is one where a diversity of interests can be brought meaningfully into the policymaking process. That can happen only in Congress. It is the only institution where a variety of views can be expressed, debated, and ultimately integrated into public policy that benefits the whole political community.

In the early republic, there was a process of consensus-creating at work in the legislature. Legislators debated ideas, found compromises, and presented broadly acceptable bills for the president to sign as a result. Unfortunately, that process no longer happens in today’s Congress. We have abandoned this tradition for presidential governance, under which neither side feels much obligation to compromise but rather to wait until it can use the executive to force as many unpalatable changes on the minority party as it can. This is not how republican government is supposed to function, but with so much authority vested in one individual, it is in practice how our system has worked for a generation.

We have abandoned this tradition for presidential governance, under which neither side feels much obligation to compromise but rather to wait until it can use the executive to force as many unpalatable changes on the minority party as it can.

None of this is to suggest that Congress should reacquire its lost powers immediately. Our Congress is like a muscle that has atrophied from lack of use. It cannot be expected to wield responsibly the many powers it has ceded to the executive branch. What is needed first is a recommitment to republicanism as legislative government. We the people should take seriously the necessity of a Congress that reflects the public will and strives earnestly to implement it. That means, at a bare minimum, we should elect people capable of wielding such power, rather than the petty strivers and ideological bomb throwers who make up so much of Congress today.

Congress today is badly broken, so much so that it seems as if there is no way to fix it. But there are commonsense solutions that make for a good starting point. One would be an overhaul of the appropriations process. The rules governing how Congress spends money are nearly half a century old. They are badly outdated and, as a consequence, Congress often fails to exercise due care in the power of the purse. Another good reform would be to expand the number of congressional districts. Today’s House seats on average represent 750,000 people per district, so many that it cannot be said that members actually speak for distinct communities. While having too many representatives in the House might make for chaos, surely the examples of other liberal democracies can provide encouraging illustrations of how it could work in the US. The German Bundestag has 630 seats, and the British House of Commons has 650, and both chambers function at least as well as the American House.

Until the people take seriously Congress’s role in a properly functioning republic, our legislature will remain a bad joke, and the presidency will retain its outsize power to leverage democratic accountability over our vast and complicated machinery of government.

Jay Cost is the Gerald R. Ford nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he focuses on political theory, Congress, and elections. Follow him on X at @Jay__Cost.