Why Congress

American Enterprise Institute fellow Wallach debuts with a stout defense of the essential role of Congress in American democracy. Drawing on the Federalist Papers, Woodrow Wilson’s Congressional Government, and other analyses of “the promise and challenge of representation,” Wallach argues that Congress is “the only body in our system capable of setting our national priorities while respecting the diversity of our vast citizenry” and praises the virtues of legislators’ “robust (and sometimes ugly) debates.” During WWII, Wallach contends, Congress played a vital if underrecognized role in mobilizing the U.S. war effort while “block[ing] the executive branch from becoming an unaccountable controller of the American economy after the war.” Elsewhere, Wallach argues that Senate supermajority requirements aided, rather than impeded, the civil rights movement by “ultimately call[ing] forth an irresistibly broad and bipartisan coalition that finally left the Southerners an isolated rump.” Beginning in the 1970s, however, a push for uniformity in both party caucuses rendered the institution ineffectual, and Wallach laments the transformation of filibustering from “an attention-focusing, oratorical ordeal to a routine obstacle bereft of actual debate,” the passage of emergency actions without deliberation by rank-and-file members, and the increase in executive actions. Ultimately, he calls on legislators to “get out of your partisan trenches and make things happen.” Nuanced and persuasive, this is a valuable reminder that Congress has risen to the moment before and can do so again. (May)