A NECESSARY LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY Envisioning An Ascendant U.S. Congress

Abstract

How can Congress take back power that it has ceded to the presidency in order to fulfill its constitutional obligation as a balancing power against the executive branch? This is the motivating question of this thesis. The United States is currently in a political era characterized by polarization, increasingly intense animus between Democrats and Republicans, executive aggrandizement, and democratic deconsolidation. All of these trends can be traced back to failures of Congress to act, oftentimes delegating its legislative powers to the executive branch due to political gridlock. Social media and the constant news cycle have created incentives for Members of Congress to value political communication with the general public more than the actual practice of legislating, contributing to the persistent inaction that Congress is known for in the modern era. This Thesis takes a retrospective look at the original theories that were used by the Framers of the Constitution to create Congress, trying to understand what their intentions were in its design so as to better understand what is in need of fixing in the modern institution. Following this logic and a robust secondary source analysis, this paper complicates the notion of government transparency as an absolute moral good and poses the question: would it be better for Congress to decrease its transparency efforts in favor of curating a more deliberative legislative environment? This question is understood through the case example of the appropriations process, understanding that Congress’s Power of the Purse is essential to its operation as the Article I. branch of the federal government. The Constitution would suggest that a less transparent Congress is well within the bounds of permissibility, directly referencing items related to transparency in the document itself. After grappling further with the notion of transparency versus secrecy, legislatively feasible reforms grounded by the original intent of the Framers of the Constitution are proposed. These reforms could properly diminish special interest groups’ influence over lawmakers as well as protect Congress from a power hungry executive branch. Ultimately, it is entirely feasible for Congress to enact reforms that decrease its transparency so that it may, counter to intuition, work better for the American people.