Money is freedom. If you have the money, you’re free to buy those stylish sneakers. You can go out for dinner. Ever since people started minting coins nearly three millennia ago, having coin has given people freedom to do things they couldn’t otherwise do.

“Money is power,” Andrew Jackson declared in an 1833 veto message. Having the money to do something gives governmental actors power. And depriving funding has sounded the death knell of many government ventures.

Our founders thought that Congress’s control of money would help to ensure our freedom. Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers, “This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”

Madison was thinking of the barons constraining the king with Magna Carta and Parliament constraining the power of the king after the Glorious Revolution. Madison called money “that powerful instrument by which we behold, in the history of the British Constitution, an infant and humble representation of the people gradually enlarging the sphere of its activity and importance, and finally reducing, as far as it seems to have wished, all the overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government.”

More recently, in the 1970s, it was through funding legislation that Congress forced an end to the Vietnam War. In the 1980s, Congress passed the Boland Amendment to block funding for the Contras in Nicaragua. In the 1990s, Congress passed limitations on U.S. military operations in Somalia.

Once again, we live in a time of “overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government.” When the President’s conception of the Constitution appears to provide little constraint on his exercise of power and the Supreme Court shows little appetite to confront him, our hopes might turn to the branch of government most frequently subject to elections.

As many have noted, Congress has been missing in action. Members of Congress’s majority increasingly identify their interests with the party brand and not the institution in which they serve or the Constitution that they swore to support and defend. As NYU’s Daryl Levinson and Richard Pildes wrote in 2006, our government is increasingly characterized by “Separation of Parties, Not Powers.”

It will likely take at least one election registering voters’ discontent with an obsequious Congress to change congressional behavior. And if Republicans in Congress see the distinct possibility that a Democrat might take back the White House, they may reconsider their acquiescence to the current administration’s accumulation of presidential power. Congressional Democrats should then join them in rebuilding democratic safeguards (in the words of Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith’s 2020 book) “After Trump.”

The keystone to this effort can be Congress’ reasserting its powers of the purse. Congress needs to limit the funding of executive branch actors who fail to comply with the law. To protect its powers and our freedoms, Congress needs to exercise its powers.

Congress needs to reclaim its constitutional authority over money. The Constitution vests in Congress—not the executive—the power to appropriate, and the executive’s role is to “take care” that Congress’ laws—including its appropriations laws—are “faithfully executed.” When it comes to money, Congress needs to lead.

Congress can lead only if it can in fact legislate. To that end, the Senate should finish the job of eliminating the filibuster. The current Republican majority has three times this year alone chipped away at the filibuster while pretending to maintain it. When Democrats regain the majority, they would be fools not to finish the job.

Over the last half century, Congress has enacted progressively fewer laws. Congress should clear the way of antiquated procedural barriers, stop serving as the executive branch’s human resources department, and resume the job of passing laws.

The former Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd made a point of saying that he served with Presidents, not under them. During the 1990 budget negotiations at Andrews Air Force Base between the George H.W. Bush administration and congressional leaders, then White House Chief of Staff John Sununu suggested that the room be cleared of staff. Byrd retorted that the White House Chief of Staff was just a staffer too, as no one had elected him. Congressional leaders might well show a little more of Byrd’s assertion of congressional prerogatives.

If Members of Congress reassert themselves and do the job that they ran to get, Americans might have hope that the legislative branch can once again serve as a check on the “overgrown prerogatives of the other branches of the government.” Starting with more energetically exercising its power of the purse, and then streamlining its legislative process, Congress can use its powers to protect the freedoms that Madison expected it would defend.