27-07-2025
Congress Is Surrendering Its Last Real Power
This hasn't been a good year for Congressional authority. Consider Congress' craven vote to claw back some $9 billion of funding it had previously allocated for foreign aid and public broadcasting. That quiet move tells you a lot about how institutional power works in Washington — especially given some of the bigger headlines of the last seven months.
First, President Donald Trump took unilateral steps to shutter government departments like the US Agency for International Development and the Department of Education, entities created by Congress to perform important government functions. Then the Supreme Court effectively blessed Trump's actions, which lower courts had treated as unconstitutional and unlawful executive usurpations of legislative authority. Now, the rescission vote — a response to the demands of the Trump administration, which had made clear it wasn't going to spend those funds no matter what — looks like a white flag of surrender.
