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It's becoming increasingly difficult to do anything in Congress. My read in DC is that politics on the Hill is becoming more rarified and elite exactly as politics in general becomes more vulgar and populist. The Congressmen and their staffers know they're doing important work, the fact that regular Americans don't know only proves how clueless we all are. The important work being mostly drafting bills that will never go anywhere, but at least they tried, what are you doing?
In that context it becomes more attractive to do everything through executive action. You run the risk of getting shut down, but that looks like better odds than the risk that Congress will do anything. And if you create the opportunity from the White House, Congress can always sign-off later.
It still has decent odds of paying off in this case. This case will probably eventually be thrown out at least for lack of standing (the plaintiff is a pedestrian who claims the new building will ruin her passive aesthetic enjoyment of the city). Maybe they'll come up with more cases. But now that the East Wing is gone it's easier to ask for Congress to bless the Ballroom than it would have been if Trump had asked for it nicely in the first place. In that case it'd probably still be in Committee.
In the long-run this also doesn't play in Congress' favor. Ok, the Ballroom polls poorly with the general public. But the lesson smart ambitious hopeful future staffers and politicians are internalizing is, "Executive Power is the only way to do anything, Congress won't do anything, Judges can't."
Congress is more and more of a rump every term. The regulatory agencies and the president are doing most of the work that Congress used to do. It’s one reason I don’t exactly hate that Trump is ignoring the process. Congress is as useless as the old Roman Senate which became a glorified debate society long before Caesar showed up. Ours is basically there, and so I expect nothing less, if Trump isn’t the founder of the Empire, the founder is coming.
To a large degree, I think this is because the people on the ground have asked for too much. It's not that the people have too little power- that was what the BoR and the Amendments are an attempt at mitigating (and were to a large degree successful)- it's that they have too much.
Regulatory agencies are an instance of this- they employ lots of people and execute a quasi-popular mandate, but that mandate is also extremely conservative (or "safe") and the agencies [have] become self-licking ice cream cones. Thus the central government becomes, by virtue of those employed at these agencies (and those who do business with them, to a lesser degree) having a vote, captured by those special interests, and Congress (being beholden to them) has become too weak to purge them. That is why it is completely ineffective against them- if Congress moved against the agencies, the people employed by them would purge Congress.
The best thing would be to disenfranchise anyone who works for those public agencies simply because it's a massive conflict of interest. The Founders got it right by not permitting DC to vote, but that has to apply to every public employee (and aside from China, no state at that time was powerful enough to have a bureaucracy of that size, so it's natural they overlooked this). In doing that, that the rest of the citizenry has a better chance of keeping them working in the public interest, not just the interest of the agency. In turn, the agencies must keep the citizenry on board with their agendas (which is in part why RFK is in the position that he is).
This is kind of why emperors get into the positions that make them emperors- the citizens wage a [civil] war, put one of them on the throne, and that generally solves the bureaucracy problem (but creates some obvious others). Elections actually do still allow the average citizen to impose some of their will, but for how long that remains the case remains to be seen.
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