What Is Congress For?

What Is Congress For?

By: Twilight Patriot

As I write this, Washington DC is dealing with the fallout of two events in which two different groups of people had to answer the question: what is Congress for?

One of these events came on February 8, when the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson. In this case, a collection of Colorado activists asked the Court to reaffirm the Colorado Supreme Court’s decision to ban Donald Trump from running for re-election on the grounds that, back in January of 2021, Trump committed “insurrection” against the United States. The fact that the various criminal charges against Trump have not yet gone to trial is of little concern to them. Instead, they argue that because the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution bars officers who have “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” from holding office again, judges should be able to remove an “insurrectionist” from the ballot as easily as they might remove a noncitizen, or a candidate who hasn’t reached the proper age.

Trump’s defenders had a different argument. They said that power to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment is given to Congress. In 1870, Congress enacted a law saying that U.S. district attorneys, by filing a legal motion called quo warranto, could ask federal judges to remove ex-Confederates from office. Later on, that law was repealed.

And even if the quo warranto law was still in force, there’s a big difference between a U.S. attorney — someone appointed by the president and confirmed by Senate — asking a judge to strip an accused insurrectionist of the right to run for office, and a group of private citizens doing the same thing. Ultimately, enforcement power for the Fourteenth Amendment belongs to Congress, and if our country is serious about being a constitutional democracy, then Trump should be tried according to laws enacted by Congress, or not at all.

Fortunately, even liberal justices like Elena Kagan appeared skeptical of the arguments that Trump’s enemies presented, as they questioned the right of state judges, acting on their own, to disqualify candidates from national elections. And with Republican appointees having a six-to-three majority anyway, we can be virtually certain that justice will prevail.

But there is bad news as well. Five days after the Court heard the Anderson case, the House of Representatives voted, by 214 to 213, to impeach Alejandro Mayorkas, the Biden administration’s secretary of homeland security. Yet the impeachment trial — if a trial is held at all — will be conducted in the Democrat Senate, which is virtually certain to acquit Mayorkas.

House Republicans impeached Mayorkas for “High Crimes and Misdemeanors” due to his deliberate nonenforcement of several immigration laws. And Mayorkas’s level of nonenforcement goes well beyond what Americans are already used to — in just three years under President Biden, about ten million illegal aliens entered the country, about the same number as were living here when Biden took office. You can read the articles of impeachment here.

All throughout the impeachment proceedings, Democrats have kept pointing to all the constitutional law experts who were on their side. They cited letters like this one, signed by a host of famous law professors including Laurence Tribe, that read, in part,

The Constitution forbids impeachment based on policy disagreements between the House and the Executive Branch, no matter how intense or high stakes those differences of opinion[.]

But is the deliberate nonenforcement of laws Congress has enacted a mere “policy disagreement”? Is Congress a mere ceremonial body, whose enactments are advisory opinions that the Executive and the Judiciary may follow or ignore as they please? Or was Congress made for something bigger?

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