Congress could be too weak to force President Donald Trump’s administration to cooperate with their various investigations, according to The Washington Post.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., warned on Thursday that President Donald Trump is “trying to render Congress inert as a separate and coequal branch of government. If we don’t stand up together, today, we risk forever losing the power to stand up to any president in the future.”
The Post notes that the legislative branch has steadily lost power to the executive branch since World War II. The Brookings Institution’s Sarah Binder, pointed out that Congress created the CIA and the NSA but gave control over them to the president.
“It bolsters the president’s ability to get what he wants,” she said, “because it’s hard to challenge the president because the president has more information.”
The Post also notes that Congress has 535 elected members each with their own staff, and who each have different constituents, while the executive branch has one elected leader, thousands of staff members, and represents everyone in the country.
"Wrangling all those cats to look like a branch of government that can exert authority vis-a-vis the other branches is just a more complicated endeavor than the executive branch,” said George Mason University political science professor Jennifer Victor.
“I don’t normally throw around terms like constitutional crisis,” Binder added, “but that is what’s happening here if Congress can’t stand up for its prerogative as an equal branch.”
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