Senior Fellow, @AEI. Studying America's separation of powers. Formerly @RSI, @BrookingsInst. Author of Why Congress, https://t.co/NbK86BtcWv
Aug 29 • 14 tweets • 5 min read
1/ First impressions from the decision holding the IEEPA tariffs impermissible:
p 30: When Congress wants to delegate tariff powers to the executive, it is good at being clear about that. It has done it many times! It did not do it here. 2/ p 31: "Regulate" and "tax" are legally distinct, with entirely different lineages, and there's no sense pretending they are one and the same.
Sep 17, 2024 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
I wanted to show how pervasive leadership dominance of the legislative process has gotten. After discovering the excellent data provided by @Libgober, I whipped up this graph—and, wow, it’s even more dramatic than I realized.
118th is still incomplete, so that last data point is in flux. But the takeaway here is clear: a vast majority of legislating in the House now happens through giant omnibuses. If you want your bill to move, you need to get it a ride—which means you need leadership’s help.
Sep 17, 2024 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
Congress is struggling: however you measure, the 118th is on pace to be the least productive in living memory. Instead of self-gov't, we get exec-driven gov't, with policies made up by White House lawyers and then bitterly fought out in court.
So what can we do to fix it?
🧵
I’ve been privileged to work w/ former members and staffers of the House, scholars of the institution, and people with deep knowledge of the chamber’s rules. Our @HooverInst @SunwaterInst Task Force report is out today with our recommendations.
Oct 23, 2023 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
1/ As we consider where House GOP goes next, consider some ancient history:
After McCarthy’s removal on 10/3, the GOP Conference met to pick his successor on Wed 10/11. Maj. Leader Steve Scalise defeated Judiciary Committee Chairman Jim Jordan in the conference vote, 113-99. 2/ That was very underwhelming, especially for the House GOP’s #2. (Scalise had, at best, lukewarm support from McCarthy.) But it was a decision, nevertheless, and the party might still have hoped to regain some kind of normal trajectory if it just made Scalise Speaker.
Mar 18, 2020 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
1/ It's taken me a little time to wrap my head around everything that's happened, but I think I now have a sense of the politics of this crisis. Some observations.
2/ It strikes me that we in the U.S. have had 3 main phases to date.
A) Denial - a sense that this virus was a bad thing happening in other places, and fundamentally didn't have anything to do with us.
B) Minimization - a sense that it just wasn't going to be that bad for us.