Source: NationalAffairs.com

Source: NationalAffairs.com

The executive branch’s growth in size and influence means more concentrated power and less democratic accountability. Each new exercise of executive power creates precedent to justify its future use. Today, the United States has an executive branch that can do just about anything it pleases, over the objections of the people’s representatives, and sometimes to spectacularly bad effect.

Congress has been complicit in its own diminution, but any path to reining in the executive must begin with the legislative branch. The most democratic of the three branches, only Congress has sufficient constitutional power to bring the executive branch to heel. To reverse the current state of executive-dominated governance, Congress needs to take steps to remedy decades of neglect and bad decisions that have enfeebled the first branch while empowering the executive… (Read more at NationalAffairs.com)