The abdication of the first branch

National Review puts the matter plainly: America faces no shortage of national interests demanding real governance, yet the lawmakers entrusted with that governance cannot be bothered to show up. I am told this is not a new complaint in your era. It was not new in mine. But familiarity with a disease does not make the disease less dangerous.

I held, and hold still, that the legislature is the branch nearest the people — the branch that draws its authority most directly from consent, renewed at the shortest intervals, answerable in the most immediate way to the citizens who send it. When that branch retreats, it does not leave a vacuum. Power is not patient. It flows to whoever is present: to the executive, to the administrative apparatus, to courts, or — and this I regard as equally alarming — to large private concentrations of wealth and organization that have no electoral accountability whatsoever. The citizen wakes to find himself governed by parties he never chose and cannot remove.

The framers of our Constitution gave Congress the power of the purse, the power to declare war, the power to make law — precisely because they feared executive energy unbounded by legislative check. That fear was well founded then. I can only infer, from the shape of your moment, that it is equally well founded now. An executive branch that acts while Congress sleeps does not act tyrannically by design in every case; but it acts without the check that consent requires, and that is tyranny in its structural form, whatever its present intentions may be.

There is a habit of mind, common to comfortable majorities in every age, that mistakes inaction for safety. "Let things alone," such people say, "and they will sort themselves." They will not. Liberty is not a natural equilibrium; it is a maintained achievement. It requires the constant, attentive labor of people willing to sit in committee rooms, read long documents, and endure the tedium of deliberation. The moment that labor is abandoned, someone else's labor fills the space — and that someone else has not been elected to do it.

I will add one word on the role of an educated citizenry in all of this. The press — however imperfect, and I spent considerable energy quarreling with newspapers in my own time — performs an indispensable service when it names this abdication plainly, as National Review has done here. Citizens who do not know that Congress has gone missing cannot demand its return. Sunlight is not a remedy by itself, but it is the precondition of every remedy. Read, inquire, and then — most urgently — insist that those who asked for your vote appear and do the work for which you gave it.