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We have them because the Founders thought it was a good idea. Then they thought it was a good idea to have two houses with different criteria, giving two chanc

• dmix 19d 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.
  • vkou 19d 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 19d ago
      I am not sure a vote of non-confidence would have helped here — there are only two parties.
      • deleted 19d ago
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      • skissane 19d 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.)
        • 0xbadcafebee 19d ago
          Even if first-past-the-post could change, it's not the whole ballgame. To get on a state ballot you need thousands of petition signatures, and those signatures can be invalidated on technicalities brought up by major parties' legal teams. To be covered by the media or be included in a debate you need to poll at a high percentage. You can't get public funding to campaign unless you already had a high percentage of the vote in a previous election. Nobody will donate to you because the third party just detracts from the other two that will give the big donors what they want. And gerrymandering ensures the same people keep getting elected. All those roadblocks are in place because the two major parties put them there to prevent 3rd party challengers. The whole thing is rigged. Just to show up and get 1% of the vote, you would need a grassroots national movement to elect someone who was wildly popular, who could build a 50-state network of volunteers (including legal, political, financial, community organizing, etc), sponsored by someone with extremely deep pockets that doesn't want anything from established political figures. And you'd still lose. We have representatives already. The problem is we never hold their feet to the fire. We keep voting for the same useless bastards, and we don't vote them out when they do nothing. Half the country doesn't vote. That's our own responsibility we're shirking. Rather than get a new party, we need to get off our collective asses, and use the existing power we have to force the parties to do their jobs.
  • fooey 19d ago
    the lesson congress learned from the Hillary Clinton coronation getting derailed by Obama was to absolutely never ever vote on anything important
    • reliabilityguy 19d ago
      Can you elaborate what you mean?
      • mlrtime 18d ago
        In 2002, Hillary Clinton voted for the Iraq War. In 2008 Obama used that fact successfully to [help] win the Democratic nomination and went on to beat McCain.
  • fweimer 18d 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 not just about executive power. In recent times, Congress failed to adjust the written law when societal consensus shifted, and the discrepancy was resolved the courts, and ultimately the Supreme Court. I don't think Congress would pass something like the Civil Rights Act under the current circumstances. This isn't good for a democracy because the political debate that is part of the regular legislative process is lost.
  • jfengel 18d ago
    I think it does largely explain it. Congress can't do even necessary things. On the rare occasions they can, they create an executive branch agency and give it the power to write regulations. They know that Congress is neither qualified nor capable of handling it. Then when the executive takes more power they have little ability to opposite it. Especially since there is a significant Congressional delegation who believes in the Unitary Executive theory, who will interfere with attempts to rein it in. I believe it is entirely due to the Founders being intent on pitting Congress against itself, while the President is a single person. They initially tried a half-assed version of that by making the runner up Vice President, but that was quickly seen to be useless. There is a lot more to be said over a quarter millennium, but that is the fundamental design flaw.
    • dmix 18d ago
      That’s a great point. Congress largely just generates new federal agencies, where there is now about 400+, and then mixing responsibilities for running them. Combine that the executive order mandate scheme and appointment/independence thing being vaguely defined. So it basically continuously empowers the executive each generation while Congress is scared to respond. Which is other half in how the two parties perfected building loyalty schemes, where the president or leading opposition candidate can kill off a congressional candidate with their influence and easily stack congress with their people. I’d personally ban a sitting president or ex president from getting involved in Congress or senate run. Also maybe a similar scheme for the Supreme Court.
• Alpha3031 19d ago
  Well, one should also remember that they thought protecting the opulent minority was so important that an entire house ought to represent them. Secure the permeant interests of the country and all that. Not that the other house isn't also tilted that way, but it seems to be that they, and the appointments approved by them, are functioning exactly as was intended (as shown by the supreme court suddenly caring about executive overreach when it came to money). Who knows whether they would care about the social issues affecting the poors nowadays, but they certainly didn't care to let the people be in charge without a veto from that opulent minority.
  • 9dev 19d ago
    They also thought owning slaves was a good idea. Perhaps we shouldn’t let men dead for centuries dictate how to run the country anymore?
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• 9dev 18d ago
  As Donald Trump and the Republicans have so aptly proven, all checks and balances depend on an elaborate system of conventions, manners and personal honor, and a general spirit of compliance. As soon as the electorate votes for a party and administration choosing to simply ignore all that, the system folds entirely. That is also the core problem for reestablishing trust with the rest of the world: Even if a Democrat or just a sane Republican wins in 28 and tries to revert many of the destructive policies the current administration enacted, there is now solid evidence the much-hailed system of checks and balances doesn’t work as advertised. And that means there is not really a legitimate argument to trust the US as much as countries and businesses did, which calls a lot of things into question—the bond market, the petrodollar, investments in the USA, dependency on American services…
• throw0101a 18d ago
  > We have them because the Founders thought it was a good idea. The US Founders also did not have political parties, and the tribal/clan thinking that goes along with them.
  • jfengel 17d ago
    They had factions, which turned almost immediately into parties: the Federalists and Anti-federalists, which morphed into the Democratic-Republicans. There were always two after that, until the former died off and the latter split into what we have had since.