The sputtering Congressional negotiation over ICE is just one example of how Capitol Hill’s repeated failures on major issues have helped marginalize lawmakers, empower presidents, and fan political tensions.
The inability to revamp the immigration system, despite multiple attempts over more than a decade, reflects lawmakers’ wider struggles to address many significant debates in lasting ways. Those chronic stalemates, in turn, have opened the door to unilateral actions by the White House, according to scholars who study the separation of powers.
The result: Wild policy swings every time the presidency changes hands, with partisan solutions that further inflame political divides. The unpopular and diametrically opposed immigration policies deployed by Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump in back-to-back terms demonstrate the ill effects.
Similarly, recent attempts to address the minimum wage, gun violence, climate change, and other issues have stalled out despite, in some cases, broad public agreement on potential solutions. Presidents have stepped in, often undoing the policies created by their predecessors.
Lawmakers have also for decades ceded power over tariffs and military action — leaving openings for Trump’s trade war and engagement in Venezuela, with little say from Congress or the public.
The pattern is one of the biggest consequences of a weakened Congress and emboldened executive branch, analysts said.
“Congress is where we go to adjudicate our concerns, where we negotiate a non-negotiable,” said James Wallner, a former senior Republican Senate aide who studies separation of powers and federal procedures.
Even at its best, debates in Congress are long and often messy, but when they work there’s also persuasion and compromise, give and take that creates buy-in for the final result.
“It has a degree of legitimacy that it would not have had if that decision had been made in some executive office somewhere,” said Wallner, now at the conservative R Street Institute. “When you give someone an opportunity to win and they lose, it’s hard for them to just delegitimize that outcome.”
Immigration Failures
Immigration is perhaps the most dramatic example of how breakdowns in Congress create a national whipsaw — with consequences now playing out in Trump’s immigration crackdown.
Not long ago, Congress tried to pass immigration changes that might have averted the current conflict.
In 2013, a bipartisan group of senators negotiated a sweeping plan that included concessions to and from both sides of the debate. It won 68 Senate votes, passing with a broad consensus. Supporters included Sens. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
But the bill died in the House, and despite subsequent negotiations, Congress hasn’t come close to passing a major immigration revamp since.
Instead, presidents tried to take action, but with short-lived policies that in some cases proved far out of line with public opinion.
After the 2013 bill failed, then-President Barack Obama created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, DACA, granting legal protections to undocumented immigrants who’d been brought to the US as young children. Without Congress’s seal of approval, however, it set off years of litigation.
Trump tried to rescind the program in his first term. Biden followed and reinstated it, while also presiding over lax enforcement and a surge in migration.
Trump, now back in the White House, has responded by flooding cities with immigration agents and setting the stage for the confrontations that have roiled the country, resulting in federal immigration agents killing two US citizens in the streets of Minneapolis.
“What we’re in danger of losing here is the idea that we can compromise across our differences and thereby resolve some difficult questions that face our country in some enduring way,” said Philip Wallach, who studies Congress at the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. “That was sort of a norm of American politics even in very partisan times. Most of the time when we make really big decisions we do it on a thoroughly bipartisan basis and that allows us to stick with our decisions and move on.”
‘Total Breakdown’
The dramatic shifts on immigration instead show what can happen when big issues are decided by a single individual, rather than by grudging consensus from lawmakers who represent the breadth of the country, according to scholars who spoke to Bloomberg Government about the decline of congressional influence and rise of executive power.
The power now vested in a single office also raises the stakes for presidential elections, turning them into existential contests, given how much can change based on one person’s direction.
It’s far easier for a single-minded White House to take action than a Congress whose rules require collective action, a super-majority vote in the Senate, and grinding negotiations. Presidents feel compelled to act when big problems remain unaddressed, said Tara Grove, a University of Texas law professor who focuses on the separation of powers.
“It’s not just presidents grabbing for power. It’s also people expecting them to do things,” she said.
Presidential action, however, doesn’t have the staying power of law.
“What you get with gridlock in Congress isn’t just an inability to act, it’s also an inability to have that robust dialogue,” said William Howell, dean of Johns Hopkins University’s School of Government and Policy and author of “Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency.” “It’s just total breakdown where the parties are siloed.”
That was part of the rationale for the Constitution’s system of checks-and-balances said Andrew Rudalevige, a Bowdoin College professor and author of “The New Imperial Presidency.”
“To prevent any single person, even any single institution’s views from dominating the stage, the idea is you are supposed to reach toward consensus, you are supposed to bargain,” Rudalevige said.
When those bargains repeatedly fail, the results can spiral for years, with sometimes devastating consequences.
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