In the 1850s, as disunion loomed and tempers frayed, so many members of Congress carried weapons into the legislature that a senator said, “The only persons who don’t have a revolver and a knife are those who have two revolvers.” (From Robert W. Merry’s “Decade of Disunion.”) Today’s congressional hostilities are less potentially lethal, perhaps because the stakes in Congress are low: Much of the disputing is purely performative because Congress lacks power. It has, lackadaisically or prudentially (to avoid controversial decisions), sloughed off many responsibilities by vast grants of discretion to the president.

How are you coping with the stress of life during today’s 43 “emergencies”? That’s how many of the 79 declared by executive orders or proclamations since 1979 are still extant. Several statutes empower the president to declare emergencies, thereby acquiring (by the count of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s law school) more than 130 standby statutory powers. The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy, in 2024 Senate testimony, said a 1934 law empowers the president to seize or close “any facility or station for wire communication” once he proclaims a threat of war. This, Healy said, is “a potential internet ‘kill switch.’”

In 2019, President Donald Trump declared a national emergency to fund, with money appropriated for other purposes, a project (the border wall) Congress had explicitly refused to fund. What fun. And so, three years later, President Joe Biden tried to use an emergency proclamation to cancel $400 billion in student loan debt. The Supreme Court, not Congress, thwarted this. (Sort of: “The Supreme Court blocked me from relieving student debt,” Biden said, “but they didn’t stop me.”)

The incoming president will be able, on a whim, to unilaterally discombobulate international commerce — and the domestic economy — with tariffs. Congress has lost interest in exercising its constitutionally enumerated power “to regulate commerce with foreign nations.”

Because of such self-diminishing actions by many previous Congresses, the new one is less central to American governance than any of its 118 predecessors. In his 2009 book, “Madison’s Nightmare: How Executive Power Threatens American Democracy,” Peter M. Shane, a constitutional and administrative law scholar at Ohio State University, wrote: “Adopted as an ethos of government, aggressive presidentialism breeds an insularity, defensiveness, and even arrogance within the executive branch that undermines sound decision making, discounts the rule of law, and attenuates the role of authentic deliberation in shaping political outcomes.”

Healy thinks all powers conferred by presidential emergency declarations should expire “in a matter of weeks” unless approved by Congress via joint resolutions. Congress might, however, be aghast at being compelled into such complicity in governing.

Under today’s presidentialism ethos, the president, not Congress, is supposed to set the nation’s agenda and dominate its political conversation. And congressional members of the president’s party are expected to be almost completely compliant. Times have changed.

When Abraham Lincoln asked Congress to promptly pass a banking reform bill, this presidential intervention in the legislative process “was considered practically a violation of Church and State. The New York Times labeled it ‘extraordinary’ and ‘injudicious.’” (From Robert Lowenstein’s “Ways and Means: Lincoln and His Cabinet and the Financing of the Civil War.”)

Presidentialism raises the stakes, and hence the temperature, of presidential politics, making every election The Most Important In History. Healy notes that in 2000, only 45 percent of Americans told pollsters that they thought it mattered greatly who won that year’s election. By 2012, 63 percent did; by 2016, 74 percent; by 2020, 83 percent.

This, in turn, produces what Trump especially, but not only he, exemplifies: the politics of catharsis. In the spring 2023 National Affairs, Mikael Good, a Georgetown University student, and Philip Wallach of the American Enterprise Institute wrote: Out is the politics of deliberation and accommodation of competing interests; in is “news-cycle combat,” which “is all about displaying bravado by throwing punches. If the point is to help your supporters feel something right now, most constitutional tools are insufficiently instant.”

Republicans should savor today’s perishable instant. Between 1900 and 1968, according to Claremont Review of Books senior editor William Voegeli, for 54 of the 68 years, one party or the other controlled the presidency and both houses of Congress. In the 56 years between 1968 and 2024, there has been divided government for 40 years. In the nine presidential elections beginning in 1992, Democrats have won control of the presidency and both houses of Congress three times (1992, 2008, 2020), Republicans four times (2000, 2004, 2016, 2024). None of these seven unified governments survived into a third year.

George Will writes a column for the Washington Post.