An oft-ignored but foundational truth about our democracy is that we do not have one.

Democracy is pure self-government. However pleasing that is to our self-determining sensibilities, the concept has a sorry history – notably, for the Framers of our Constitution, in ancient Greece and the fragmented Italian peninsula. They were thus suspicious of democracy’s geopolitical limitations (only in small, homogeneous communities is participatory governance practicable) and the inevitability of its fall to hostile neighbors or mob rule.

Hence, the United States is a republic, now the most venerable in history, proudly marching toward its Semiquincentennial (or is it Bisesquicentennial?). It is vital to bear this distinction.

First, because we tend to extol democracy without the caveat that ours is a specific, evolved form – a democratic republic – we overlook the importance of representation. It’s not a new problem. In The Federalist, No. 14, Madison observed that naysayers against the then-proposed Constitution conflated democracy and representative republic, intimating that the latter would be undone by the fatal flaws of the former – the very flaws the republic was designed to address.

Second, consider these ameliorating features of the republic: representatives accountable to the people of diverse states, capable of championing parochial interests while mindful of the national interest, enabling the growth of a mighty nation in a way democracy cannot. Modern society, now not just industrial but technologically transformed, is vastly more complex than late Eighteenth Century America. Still, this imperative of representation as a bulwark against democracy’s descents into anarchy and tyranny is a foundational truth. Our progress and its complexities cannot alter it.

This must be front-of-mind because representation is failing in modern American governance.

Just as we sometimes unthinkingly laud democracy when we mean republic, so too are we apt to describe the branches of our federal government as co-equal.

No. They are peers, to be sure. Each is bound by the rudimentary principle that their powers are separate: these discrete authorities may and often should be exercised in unison (e.g., the president and Congress acting together against a foreign threat to our defense), but never by the same set of hands. The separate branches, however, are not equals.

Congress is the Article I power. As the breadth of its enumerated powers elucidates, it is primus inter pares. In a republic framed to achieve representative governance, it is the representative. Indeed, in the Constitution’s original blueprint, the House was the only component of the three branches that would be directly elected by the people – and only by the people in the jurisdiction to be represented by a congressman. (It would be a man back then, but a self-correcting republic overcomes all manner of waywardness.)

It was Congress that embodied the republic’s democratic aspirations. Our aspirations haven’t changed, but without a functioning legislative branch, they are certain to be frustrated. Our governing framework cannot be sustained in such circumstances.

Our laws reflect the values of Americans. That is why only our representatives are empowered to write them, presidents are dutybound to execute them faithfully, and courts must apply them without fear or favor. If Congress ceases to be able to legislate – if it is polarized into paralysis by factional extremes, if it is unable to arrive at the reasonable compromises between parochial and national interests that the Constitution envisions – then we are no longer governing ourselves.

It is in Congress, moreover, that the Framers vested an arsenal of weapons to rein in abuses of executive power. The courts can do this only episodically, as cases arise; and because the judiciary is the apolitical branch, its fidelity must be to the logic of law and the rights of particular litigants, not popular sentiment. Plus, as the Supreme Court held in Trump v. United States (2024), it is not for prosecutors and judges to punish misconduct in the execution of presidential power. Only Congress can do that.

We are a deeply divided country. Yet, that is our default condition historically. We’ve thrived, not self-immolated, because constitutional government through deliberative legislation by our representatives works. It provides stability even when our differences are immense. Without it, our divisions will remain but our stability will continue to erode as each presidential election portends new, contradictory extremes of government by executive order.

For the republic to endure, Congress must be restored.