For the last 28 years, every other week, former Congressman Lee Hamilton wrote a commentary about how Congress and our representative democracy work and—just as frequently—about how they should work. He also wrote a weekly column for the 34 years he served in Congress before that.
Lee Hamilton passed away on February 3 after he’d put the finishing touches on this one. It will be his last of well over 2,000 commentaries over the course of his career.
If you’ve been following relations between Congress and President Trump recently, there have been some intriguing signs of legislative independence. Memorably, of course, there was last year’s vote to release the Epstein files. Early this year, the Senate very nearly voted to enact the War Powers Act to check the president’s military actions against Venezuela; it failed on a tie broken by the vice president.
Even more recently, GOP Sen. Tom Tillis of North Carolina has vowed to block movement on President Trump’s pick for Federal Reserve chair until a criminal probe of current chair Jerome Powell is resolved—a bid to ensure Fed independence. GOP Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, chair of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, has become a vocal skeptic of the tactics being pursued by ICE and the Border Patrol in American cities. And Senate Majority Leader John Thune of South Dakota has rejected the president’s call to “nationalize” voting in the US.
Still, for the most part, these are individuals speaking out—not an institution flexing its muscles. On Venezuela, war powers, tariffs, the federal budget, ICE and Border Patrol behavior, President Trump’s admitted use of the presidency for personal gain, his destruction of the East Wing of the White House and determination to erect a triumphal arch in his own honor—on all these things, Congress seems unwilling to make its presence felt beyond much more than words.
In short, Congress has repeatedly shown itself unwilling to be as tough-minded and ruthless as the administration it’s facing. It could cut off funding for overseas adventurism, or call the administration to account for tariffs, or flex its muscles on the budget, or delve into the utter dismantling of the federal government’s institutional knowledge, especially as regards public health and science. But after a year of mostly going along with the administration and allowing itself essentially to be ignored, it’s going to take something really dramatic for Congress to deal itself back into the game.
Members themselves recognize this. During a trip to Greenland by lawmakers concerned by the rapid deterioration in relations between the US and Europe over President Trump’s aggressive behavior toward the Danish-owned territory, GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters, “Congress has ceded its authority in far too many areas. We’re the ones that have to speak up for our role. We can’t just complain that there’s executive overreach.”
Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs of California was even blunter. “It is because of decades of Congress just completely abrogating its responsibility,” she said. “And that’s true of both parties in Congress, and it’s true of presidents of both parties.”
Why does this matter? Let me ask that question a different way: If Congress doesn’t get its act together and declare loyalty through its actions to its constitutional role as a co-equal branch of government—rather than to a single president—then where does that leave the American people? Who will represent them?
I ask this because poll after poll shows that on issue after issue, from mass deportations of immigrants—not just criminals, but women, children, hard-working community members, asylum-seekers, and others—to the independence of the Federal Reserve to the US posture toward Europe to attacks on vaccines, this administration is working against public opinion. This is where Congress should be weighing in: If you oppose what the administration is trying to do, you want Congress to intervene. If you support the administration and want its policies to last for the longer term, that will only happen if a robust majority in Congress can carve out common ground behind a consensus.
I have one other point I’d like to make as well. While I firmly believe that Congress is falling short of its responsibilities if it’s anything other than a muscular player in the creation and oversight of national policy, I also firmly believe that we voters bear a responsibility, too. It’s up to us to elect representatives to Congress who will push it to assert the role our founders gave it. It’s what centuries of Americans before us believed in, and we should expect no less.