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Hello and welcome to the Bullwark podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome back to the show, Professor of History at Boston College, where she teaches 19th century American history. That's seemingly relevant. She also writes a newsletter you may have heard of letters from an American on Substack. Her books include Democracy Awakening, Notes on the State of America published last year at Heather Cox Richardson. How you doing? I'm good, and it's always a pleasure to be here, Tim. Thanks for having me. Appreciate you so much and the work you're doing. We've got a bunch

to get to. And you kind of wrote a newsletter because it was yesterday on the abdication of Congress

across a bunch of different verticals. The house has been out now for weeks. The House has barely been in over the past few months.

Josh Dawsey reported in the Wall Street Journal, I guess it was over the weekend, that the Trump

administration officials are joking about ruling Congress with an iron fist, that Steve Bannon's

compared Congress to Russians largely ceremonial Duma. It is pretty

shocking, you know, just how little they're trying to exercise their powers down there. I want to

get your take on that. It is more than just a little shocking. It is truly shocking because the

whole concept of the American government as it was laid out in the Constitution was that the people's

house was Congress. We talk about the three branches of government, but the first article of the

Constitution covers the legislative branch, which is the two houses of Congress, the Senate and the House

of Representatives. And that is where the power of the government resides. And that is where legislation is supposed to happen. That's where public spending is supposed to happen and so on. And the Republicans in Congress, I think that's an important distinction to make between the Republicans and the Democrats, have essentially given up their control over spending, over legislation, over even things like this government shutdown

and then referring to Donald Trump. So it's a profound attack on the setup of our government.

It's also really astonishing because the idea behind the Constitution was that the legislators

...