http://thehill.com/opinion/555...sing-power-president/

>> Seriously, when was the last time you remember Congress passing any significant legislation? Monumental achievements like Medicare, the Clean Air Act, the Voting Rights Act, or the Civil Rights Act, aren't possible anymore. This 119th Congress, like the last few sessions, is incapable of probing, debating, and resolving such weighty issues. It can't even manage its most basic job of keeping the government running.
Sadly, history will show that nobody seized Congress or stole away its authority. Its wounds are self-inflicted. Through laziness, lack of courage, or sheer party loyalty over what's best for the nation, members of Congress gradually ceded their powers, starting with the power to declare war.
The Constitution is clear: Under Article 1, Section 8, only Congress has the power to declare war. Yet Congress has not exercised that power since World War II. In 1950, President Harry Truman bypassed Congress and ordered U.S. military intervention on the Korean peninsula. Since then, every American war - Vietnam, Gulf War, Afghanistan, and Iraq - has been launched by a president. Congress has ceded its war-making power to the president and is unlikely ever to get it back.
This year, Congress made another huge concession, voluntarily surrendering what is perhaps its most-prized responsibility: control of federal spending. Again, the Constitution is clear. Only Congress has the power of the purse. A president cannot refuse to spend money already appropriated by Congress - unless it cedes that power to the president, which it has.

In July, the Republican-controlled House and Senate voted to let President Trump rescind $9 billion in funding for foreign aid and public broadcasting already approved by Congress. Even though $9 billion is just a small slice of the overall federal budget, Forbes magazine called it a "tectonic shift" in the balance of powers and one that Congress may soon regret. Because, again, once having ceded ultimate power over spending to the White House, they may never get it back.
But, as historian Douglas Brinkley recently revealed in a speech to the White House Historical Association, it is by issuing executive orders that presidents have most persistently eroded the power of the legislative branch. It is a practice used by every president since George Washington for some of the most important measures ever taken by the U.S.<<

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"One of the reasons why propaganda tries to get you to hate government is because it's the one existing institution in which people can participate to some extent and constrain tyrannical unaccountable power." Noam Chomsky.

Government only exists to enrich yourself and punish your enemies.



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Let's go blood clot