We live in an era of regime-change politics. Politically engaged Americans act like two rival nations fighting for control of a single government. Every four years, we decide—in a single election between two candidates—who will rule and who will be ruled.

And the winner rules by a blizzard of executive orders and agency actions. Each new administration acts as though every old law can be immediately repealed, and any new law can be enacted instantly—which they more or less can be, when they are simply executive orders and agency edicts.

In the aftermath of Watergate, Alexander Bickel warned: “We cannot survive a politics of moral attack … We must resume the politics of what Burke called the ‘computing principle: adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.’” Which is to say: America cannot forever endure a politics of clashing absolutes, where two warring factions attempt to impose their will unilaterally. We need a politics of moderation and compromise—that is, a politics of legislation.

Of course, today our politics are profoundly worse: much more pointed, much more absolutist, and much less legislative. Congress has effectively ceased to be a legislative body; it is now mostly a reactive body, holding hearings and announcing opinions but never really legislating.

Presidents love to use Congress’s inertia to justify their own assertions: if Congress won’t act, then I will. But this gets the situation backwards. The defining fact of our era is: Congress won’t act, because Presidents will.

Congress already vested the presidency with enormous policymaking discretion, by a century of legislative delegations of power in extremely broad terms. Under those open-ended laws, virtually all policymaking energy is channeled into presidential elections and presidential administrations—instead of Congress. And our era’s wild changes in policy from one administration to the next constantly undermine the stability that should undergird daily life and long-term decisions. This is especially harmful for companies that need to make big investments on long timeframes.

As it happens, this is exactly what Alexander Hamilton warned against, in his famous case for executive power. Our Constitution has “energy in the executive” not simply for its own sake, but for the sake of “steady administration of the laws.” And, he warned, the antithesis of good administration would be a constant run of policy flip-flops, creating “a disgraceful and ruinous mutability in the administration of the government.”

So, the reforms we need most are the ones that constrain an administration’s capacity for abrupt policy upheavals. And they need to come from the other two parts of government: the Congress and the courts.

The courts are already moving in the right direction, especially in the Supreme Court’s recent decisions ending Chevron deference and elaborating the “major questions doctrine”—the former significantly reduces the space that courts afforded agencies to make wild flip-flops, and the latter creates a presumption against agency claims of power to unilaterally create unprecedented, transformative new regulatory policies.

But other key cases—including two from the first Trump Administration—relied on the Administrative Procedure Act’s own limits on arbitrary changes in administrative policy.

These cases differ in their specifics, but they all point to a common goal: limiting the executive branch’s power to make new laws unilaterally, and therefore channeling political energy back to Congress, instead of agencies and the White House. Perhaps the Court’s imminent decision on the Trump tariffs will be the next example of that trend.

But Congress, in turn, needs to reform itself as a genuinely legislative body. The Senate should carefully but seriously consider reforming the filibuster rules with a “mend it, don’t end it” mindset: preserving the Senate’s capacity for serious (even prolonged) debate and discussion, but without simply allowing one Senator, or even a small bloc of Senators, to passively impose a gag rule on legislation.

Moreover, as my AEI colleagues have written, a well-functioning Congress would do more through committees than through the leadership or individual members. Congress needs to re-learn how to “facilitate bargaining across factional and party lines.”

This is the two-part reform that we urgently need: the courts must continue to limit the President’s kingly instincts, by limiting his power to be our legislator-in-chief. And our actual legislators need to reform their own institution accordingly.