Well ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?

Please do listen to this. Jonah Goldberg hosts the Remnant Podcast brought to you by the dispatch and dispatch media. I'm very excited for today's episode not only because it's a first time guest and a colleague of the American Enterprise Institute, but it's also one of the core topics on the Remnant Podcast Bingo card. And it's going to be for worn.

Civic nerdiness lies ahead. So go get canned goods do what you need to do. Gerger lines.

Or there's no turning back now. But I guess today is Philip Wallach. He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

We're to studies the separation of powers with a focus on regulatory issues and the relationship between Congress and the administrative state is latest book why Congress and for those with filthy minds. It's not the verb.

Why Congress. No, it's ladies but why Congress. He defends the centrality of Congress and America's constitutional system traces the roots of current dysfunction and suggests how the institution might be.

So Phil, welcome to the Remnant. So I always ask authors why do you write this book. I know why I wanted you write this book. Why did you think this book was necessary?

I come to specialize studying in Congress in the last number of years in my life because it seems that Congress is sort of the wobbly leg of the stool and needs work.

It's the part of our system that seems sort of under a lot of stress and not bearing up under it all that well. So thinking about how we can make Congress work better is what motivated me to get into studying Congress.

And the book is sort of premise on the idea that we need to go back to basics and really think about why the Congress is there and the first place why representative government is such a marvel if we understand it properly.

That's not something that most people think about very much. I think an awful lot of well-educated Americans who are tuned into politics. Maybe they can quote you something from their eighth grade civics class but on the whole they have the sense that Congress is just a futile place.

They're fed up with it and they don't have much patience for it and they would be hard pressed to say why we should bother with it. So there we go. There's the book. Why Congress?

Fair enough. I will often as listen to this book as no make the case that well first of all the whole idea that the three branches are co-equal is actually a fiction that comes out of the watergate era because in fact Congress according to the Constitution is supreme.

It's like it's the only branch that can fire members of the other branch. It controls the power of the person taxation which the family father is actually thought a lot about the importance of taxation as the power to clear war.

It creates all of the executive branch agencies except for a handful of them. It creates all the courts except for the Supreme Court.

Although I guess there's some weird bankruptcy court things that are kind of like complicated that we don't need to get into.

It also does this thing that we used to tell people in grade school called right the laws which is kind of important in a country.

And yet people think it's bizarre that you would want Congress to be the most powerful branch including it seems like a lot of members of Congress who have spent the last century or so doing their best to make it not the most powerful branch.

So like where do you begin that first I'll disagree with any of that as you see fit.

Where does this story of Congress voluntarily giving up its prerogatives to the executive branch in the courts? Where do you think it begins?

Well it is a long story right it's at least the century old maybe even more than that really.

I don't disagree with anything you said but we have the difference between now and the founding years we have this huge body of statutory law that all of which comes from previous Congress's.

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