When Congress Walks Away

How the 119th Congress abandoned its job—and the people who need it most

Donald Trump is the great attention-suck of our times. His outsized, floridly transgressive personality mesmerizes the media, the political world, the country itself. How often do you wish you could simply ignore him, or forget about him?

But it seems that’s impossible. From an early age, Trump made himself—using the raw materials of a deeply broken psyche—into a master, a monster of performance. Endless, blaring, narcissistic, needy, clownish and cruel, Trump seeks to own every news cycle, and he usually succeeds.

There is a terrible cost to this kind of presidency, of course. The great temptation in our republic right now is to look only at the presidency—to fixate on the broken personality in the White House radiating his inner resentments like a dying star. To focus on his latest provocation, like worrying a loose tooth. To stop and gape at the daily spectacle of it all.

But that focus misses a deeper and more consequential failure now unfolding in Washington. The real scandal, I believe, is not what the executive branch is doing. It is what the 119th Congress—especially the Republican leadership and rank and file—is choosing not to do. Trump isn’t seizing power so much as Congress is surrendering it, meekly, and willingly. We are witnessing a great abdication by the people’s representatives, and the consequences, as always, land hardest on the people who have the least voice in Washington.

Congress was never meant to be a merely ceremonial institution. Jim Wright, the Democratic Speaker of the House in the 1980s and 1990s, used to bark three words at White House aides who made the trip up Pennsylvania Avenue to inform him what the current occupant of the Whoie House wanted from the Hill—”We’re Article I.” The Framers put Congress first in our Constitution. They designed the legislative branch to be the main driver of the nation’s policies, and for much of our history, it has been.

Not now. So far in Trump II, on the most consequential questions of spending, war powers, oversight, and economic governance, Congress has increasingly behaved like a bystander—reacting after the fact, declining confrontation, and treating the assertion of its own authority as optional rather than essential.

This is a terrible and costly abdication.

When Congress retreats from its proper role, power flows somewhere else—it has to. No surprise, under Trump, it flows into the executive branch, and into closed-door decision-making with billionaires and foreign potentates far from public scrutiny. When that happens, working Americans lose first. They lose transparency. They lose leverage. They lose the one branch of government designed to be closest to them.

The reporting shows a clear pattern: major spending decisions are made without genuine legislative negotiation; executive orders with sweeping economic and social consequences, orders that seize explicit authorities granted to Congress, take effect without any resistance; oversight is reduced to press releases and selective outrage. The machinery of Congress stills. The work of actual democratic self-governance—which is designed to be hard, loud, contentious, and accountable—has been replaced by meek deference.

The blame rests squarely on the shoulders of Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, and Senate Majority leader John Thune. Earlier this week, I had a little something to say about all this on CNN:

The deference of Republican leaders—or most Republicans—is often justified as political realism. Why pick a fight with a president of your own party? Why insist on institutional prerogatives when loyalty is rewarded and independence punished? Why risk dysfunction when silence keeps the peace?

Because Congress does not exist to keep the peace among politicians. It exists to serve the public.

For ordinary Americans—people who work hourly jobs, juggle rising costs, depend on stable public services—Congress is supposed to be the place where their representatives stand up for them, making the necessary tradeoffs and compromises in the open. Responsibility is visible. Decisions affecting wages, healthcare, labor protections, and national security are being surrendered to the executive branch. Trump demands; Trump gets what he wants; Congress sleeps.

This moment is especially revealing because it comes from a party that has long spoken reverently about limited government and institutional balance. Yet when faced with the chance—and the obligation—to assert Congress’s role, the Republican majority has largely chosen submission over independence. The language of principle yields to the habit of compliance—almost every time.

That habit of subservience actually corrodes democracy more effectively than any single executive overreach.

This retreat has real-world effects. It means military actions undertaken with minimal public debate, or real congressional oversight. Economic policies shaped without sustained attention to the actual incomes and household costs of the American people. Health care in chaos. No accountability in Congress. The republic cannot function this way for long.

And here is the moment of truth. In the coming weeks—on funding decisions, oversight fights, and the use of executive power—members of the 119th Congress will face choices that cannot be explained away by party loyalty or procedural excuses. They will either act as representatives of the people, or continue as spectators to their own irrelevance.

Then they will face the voters.

History is unforgiving to the leaders of institutions who shrink from responsibility when they are needed most. So are voters. The question now is not whether Congress has the power to act. It is whether it still has the will. And whether the voters still have the will and the power to change its course.

—Terry