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The Trump administration has been exhaustingly eventful, but almost none of the events have involved Congress.
The beginning of Donald Trump's presidency has been an extension of the past six years of the Obama administration, when Capitol Hill was largely a sideshow to the main event in the executive branch.
Until further notice, this is the American model - government by and of the president. We live in the age of unilateral rule.
To his credit, Trump hasn't pushed the constitutional envelope the way Obama did with his Clean Power Plan and executive amnesty (both blocked in the courts) or tried anything as audacious as having bureaucrats write letters mandating sexual-assault and bathroom policies for colleges and schools nationwide.
What Trump has done is firmly within bounds and largely defensive in nature. He has either reversed Obama's unilateral actions or used executive orders as symbolic measures.
Still, the yin and yang from Obama to Trump means American government has become a badminton match between rival presidents with dueling executive actions.
Consider the Paris accord. Whether or not to be part of a 195-country climate treaty that either will save the planet or hamper our economy for no good reason (depending on your point of view) is the whim of one man. Obama said thumbs-up. Trump said thumbs-down. Congress is a spectator, possessing a constitutional power to ratify treaties that is a wasting asset.
Obama and Trump have effectively decided what the immigration laws are.
In Obama's version, there was a formal, temporary amnesty for Dreamers and a de facto amnesty for other illegal immigrants (so long as they didn't commit other crimes).
In Trump's version, the temporary amnesty for Dreamers is still in force, and the de facto amnesty is off. (Importantly, except for the Dreamer amnesty, Trump's version actually accords with laws passed by Congress.)
The same goes for a host of environmental regulations, imposed unilaterally by Obama and in the process of being lifted by Trump.
All of this back-and-forth means our laws are mostly contested in the realm of executive decisions, agency rule-making and the courts. Arguably, in striking down Trump's travel ban on highly dubious grounds, the 4th US Circuit Court of Appeals has done more legislating this year than the Congress.
If Trump's unilateral rule is an extension of what has come before, it is also an intensification. First, there's the timing. Ordinarily, a president loses Congress or stalls several years into his tenure and has to look to foreign affairs and executive orders for victories. Trump is already dependent on presidential unilateralism, even though his party controls both houses of Congress.
It's not that Trump is deliberately cutting out Congress; he is desperate for it to get things done. He just doesn't have the interest or knowledge base to push anything along in Congress.
The hope of advocates of congressional power prior to Trump taking office was that a weak president would defer to Congress and allow it to reassert its prerogatives. Instead, a weak president (low approval numbers, little clout) is now matched with a weak Congress.
The legislative branch has been kneecapping itself for decades. It has long been happy to hand over authority to the administrative state, and more recently has gotten out of the habit of passing almost anything except last-minute omnibus spending bills. The Senate, in particular, is debilitated by a near-automatic 60-vote threshold.
Second, there is the continued centralization of power in the White House. This has been the trend from Richard Nixon through Obama. But Trump has taken it to another level; he operates on a hub-and-spoke system, with a small group of loyalists and family members jostling for influence around him.
The day Trump nearly initiated the process of pulling out of NAFTA before thinking better of it captures the method perfectly - no serious deliberation, just the president's state of mind, based in large part on whom he had spoken to last. This is highly personal (and highly idiosyncratic) rule.
In the mid-1980s, the late political scientist Ted Lowi wrote a book called "The Personal President." It warned of the effects of a "plebiscitary" presidency unhinged from Congress and political parties. He was onto something, although Bill Clinton and George W. Bush in subsequent decades governed fairly traditionally. It is with Obama and Trump that we have moved into a new gear.
No matter what the written rules are, any system of government is susceptible to change through habits and precedent. We may be witnessing the creation of a new norm, one that hollows out the branch of government charged with writing the nation's laws.
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