The farmer bailout is no less opaque, which is troubling given the results of the Commodity Credit Corporation’s most recent audit^[17]. Just before the Trump administration announced the first round of trade aid, government contractors found^[18] that the Corporation’s accounting for budgetary transactions suffered from a “material weakness,” or “a deficiency … in internal control such that there is a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement of the entity’s financial statements will not be prevented, or detected and corrected, on a timely basis.” Notwithstanding this bright red flag, President Trump effectively doubled the Corporation’s fiscal responsibilities in each of the past two years.

Instead of focusing on these disconcerting regimes, the current Congress has bigger fish to fry—such as inspecting Trump’s tax returns^[19], or investigating Hilary Clinton’s server^[20] (still!). You know, the really important stuff.

To be sure, Trump is faithlessly executing the law, in violation of his constitutional oath. At the same time, he is acting ambitiously, just as the Framers would have expected. Today’s passive Congress, by contrast, would be unrecognizable to the Founders, who had feared that “[t]he legislative department is everywhere extending the sphere of its activity, and drawing all power into its impetuous vortex.” Far from accreting power as expected by constitutional drafters, the contemporary Congress delegates away its authority and then loses interest. Rather than compete with the president, Congress abets the president’s ambition. Therein rests the root of our present problem.
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