Congress: How It Worked and Why It Doesn’t Course notes

• The Founders believed that separating the powers of government into three branches would help prevent tyranny.
• For the Founders, it is essential that a law be guided by reason.
• The natural law is the part of God's law that man can access through his reason alone. According
  to the Founders, it is the standard for measuring all human law.
• The Founders believed that the quintessential virtue of a good legislator is deliberation.
• The Progressives argued that government should be understood as a living organism.
• The Progressives thought that the Founders' system of separation of powers made government inefficient.
• The Progressives sought to turn Congress into a body that issued general policy goals and vision statements.
• The Progressives viewed the President as a potential "chief legislator," because he was in a unique position to form and shape public opinion, offer the American people a vision for the future, and use the force of his personality to thrust the Congress into action.
• According to the doctrine of non-delegation, Congress may not transfer its legislative power to any other entity of the government.
• The intelligible principle standard gradually became the constitutional justification for the enormous transfer of legislative power from Congress to administrative entities.
• In his dissent in the Mistrettai case, Justice Scalia argued that the reliance on the "intelligible principle test" had allowed Congress to make "junior varsity" legislatures.
• It was during the era of the New Deal that it became common for Congress to delegate broad powers to regulatory agencies.
• The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) placed almost no restrictions on the power of the President to fix the economy.
• Woodrow Wilson described Congress as "secretive, unaccountable, and uninteresting".
• Many Progressives, such as Woodrow Wilson, viewed the British style of government as a model for their reform efforts.
• Initially, the Progressives put their faith in the Speaker of the House as the political figure who could become a kind of "prime minister" in American government.
• After 1910, Progressives thought that taking away the power of the Speaker to control committee appointments and implementing a seniority system would move Congress in a progressive direction.
• Regulatory capture theory argues that administrative agencies begin to serve the interests of corporations.
• Liberals lost their faith in the president as the leader of the administrative state during the Nixon years.
• The typical congressman is uninterested in conducting substantive oversight because there is little incentive to do so.
• By issuing vague policy goals to agencies, the typical congressman can avoid making hard policy choices that might be unpopular and therefore hurt his or her chances of getting re-elected.
• In 1957, the total number of personal staff members of all U.S. Senators was approximately 1,100. Today, that number stands at 4,000.
• Dr. Portteus argues that the primary reason for the lack of compromise in Congress is because the two parties are committed to fundamentally different views of justice.
• Lincoln argued that a common understanding of justice and the purposes of the American Founding is especially important because America is based on idea.
• The root cause of Congress' dysfunction is its transformation from a legislative institution into a component of the administrative state.
• With the creation of the administrative state, we now have a situation in Congress where there is a disconnect between a congressman's constitutional duty and his personal interest.
• The federal bureaucracy no longer fears Congress, primarily because Congress has relinquished its control over the budget process.
• If Congress ever does transform itself back into the legislative institution that the Framers designed it to be, it will be because public opinion on the issue shifts dramatically.

Source: Congress: How It Worked and Why It Doesn’t.