Philip Wallach Profile picture
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. Image 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. Image
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. Image 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. Image
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.
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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.