Thread by @MattGlassman312

Presidents benefit when inaction maintains status quo; Congress benefits when inaction creates lapses in authorities or funding.

This is why power of purse gives Congress leverage; funding runs out; only positive action can replace it. Essentially, discretionary funds sunset.

Unfortunately for Congress, they have tended *not* to sunset other grants of authority. Mandatory spending (which is majority of appropriations now) isn’t sunset. Inaction by Congress maintains the status quo. Ditto with most grants of executive authority, like AUMFs.

When it takes positive congressional action to *repeal* grants of authority to the executive, Congress runs into a big problem: they can give POTUS power with a majority vote, but need to overcome a veto to repeal it.

If Congress was serious about maintaining power over executive, they could sunset all grants of authority to expire at end of each Congress. On first day of new Congress, they could pass the “power package,” re-upping each POTUS authority, leaving out what they wanted to expire.

The key here is that authority would expire and would require positive congressional action to be continued; if they wanted it gone, they could simply do nothing. Most power would be continued most Congresses. But anything they wanted gone could simply be dropped.

A bold institutional move by Congress would be to pass a massive sunsetting bill for all POTUS power—AUMFs, National Emergency Act, National Security trade authority, etc. It wouldn’t end any powers, but it would shift the balance of power *over* ending them to Congress.

This will not happen. But make no mistake, it’s an important feature of how the executive dominates Congress. They give him power; they cannot claw it back. Ever.

Occasionally, Congress has smartly done this. TARP was sunset, for example. This is especially important in cases (like TARP) where executive discretion runs wild, and the meaning of statutes is interpreted far more broadly for governance than intended by the legislature.

I suspect, under a universal sunset system, mostly everything would be the same as it is now. It would only be on the margins—like would the 116th Congress have renewed the National Emergencies Act?—that anything would change. That would probably be good.

The executive needs room to govern. That’s what discretion is for, and it’s vital to good government. But the legislature probably needs to be able to more easily claw back grants of power that have exceeded the intent of Congress. Sunsets are the way to achieve this.