(This column by George F. Will, Sept. 5, is 1,000 shades of awesome.) 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….
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…. [The rest of this column is at this link.]
