"All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives." - U.S. Constitution, Article 1, Section 1

There is no dispute or reservation in my own discernment that I hold Congress in the greatest favor amongst any of the established authorities outlined in the United States Constitution; that is, when they've at least proven themselves to be effective.

The purpose of Congress as outlined in Article 1 of the Constitution, was to be the only power within the federalist system that created law based on the legislative processes of debate and amendation of any bill that is brought forth within the Senate and the House of Representatives. More importantly, it would be the United States Congress that hold the greatest influence in the construction of policy as it represents the governing body most connected to the will of the people; ideally that is.

With the Senate's 100 Senators and the House's 435 Representatives all elected by the popular vote in each legislator's respected states, legislation would only be passed after going through the most tedious journey of being debated, amended, regulated, analyzed and revised.

Another authority, sometimes gone unnoticed, is the Legislature's ability to be able to hold irrefutable checks against the powers of the Executive and Judiciary branches of government.

Holding the power of the federal purse, control over commerce, approval of presidential appointments to federal agencies and courts, the authority to declare war, the ability to establish treaties and the power to levy or repeal taxes are all responsibilities that make the legislature a fierce and powerful player in the American political system.

However, if abused, the legislature can also be used as an infamous oligarchic super-authority riddled with autocrats, bureaucrats, and elitists that are more interested in legislation that benefits the interests of the governing authorities rather than the people they supposedly represent and are elected to represent.

More dangerous still, if abused with fecklessness and autocracy, the legislature's power of the purse could immediately be used to crush the economy by failing to enact legislation that first honors the national debt and second enables economic liberty to its citizens. One needs only look at the current state of the Union to see what happens when Congress becomes nothing more than a pile of caliginous junk.

According to analysis by Congressman Christopher of Cox through the Heritage Foundation in 1992, "

" Why is it that Congress has slipped so much in the estimation of the American people? I think it is because Congress has failed in its signal responsibility to the taxpayers to control the purse strings in our constitutional system. If it is not in the act of declaring war, the greatest responsibility of the Congress, as the appropriating branch of the government, is to control the purse strings."

This statement couldn't be any more closer to the truth. The current trends of Congress have seemed to indicate a massive wave of fecklessness, especially considering the construction of policy.

Our national debt, excluding unfunded liability deficits, is now peaking at $20,000,000,000,000. Our tax code, which is a compilation of all tax laws passed in the United States Congress since the Constitution was ratified in 1787, has now exceeded 70,000 pages of incomprehensible regulations that have decimated competition in the market by wiping out small businesses with insurmountable tax burdens before they even have the opportunity to start.

As of now 94,610,000 people are currently out of the workforce according to the Bureau of Labor, the labor participation rate is the lowest its been in years and more people have been calculated to have been receiving some form of government assistance than those who have full-time work. Through Congress, the ten districts that have seemed to prosper most out of any recent legislation are in Washington D.C., being properly referred to as the ten richest districts in the United States.

Under the most recent administration, President Obama had failed to give any reasonable budgets that focus on reducing the tax burdens and slicing the national debt, but has continuously made a habit of proposing trillions of dollars in new tax increases and new spending, and Congress has been made to be feckless in its ability to force the President to honor the debt and use its vetoing power to effect. Bills like the infamous fiscal cliff deal of 2013 which increased taxes by $650,000,000,000 dollars which effected 70% of all American households.

Others like the infamous Obamacare bill, which nationalized healthcare across the market, not only decimated the insurance market, but cost American taxpayers over $3,000,000,000,000, cut over $700,000,000,000 in funding to Medicare, skyrocketed premium costs and is projected to cost the American economy trillions more over the next decade.

Not only did Congress pass Obamacare as a tax which would essentially make the government a monopoly share-holder of the insurance market, but their actions have basically legitimized the federal government being a player and influencer in the free-market economy, which is a gross overstepping of its Constitutional confines.

I had warned in a previous article the dangers of a federalist system of government that recognizes the power of alliances within itself to achieve the coveted purchase of radical consumption of power and oversight over the populace.

The greatest offender in this case is Congress, when its actions continually show that the last thing on its agenda is being the branch most connected to the will of the people.

If anything, the 239 year trend has been away from the will of the people and more towards achieving centralized power in Washington D.C., where legislators making six to seven figures a year on the taxpayer dime pass meaningless and useless legislation consisting of thousands of pages of regulations and bylaws of which no one has ever read in depth. Nancy Pelosi (D), the current House Minority Leader and Representative from California's 12th district, encompassed this lunacy when she stated in an interview on the subject of Obamacare that "We need to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it."

According to Forbes, " On March 23, 2010, for example, President Obama signed into law the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as 'ObamaCare.' That 2,700 page monstrosity also generated between 20,000 and 30,000 additional pages of regulations, depending on how one counts them, and that regulatory labyrinth continues to grow."

These shocking facts indicate the absurdity of passing legislation of this kind of "gargantuan" status and expecting to find out exactly whats entailed within its rubric. Forbes goes on to analyze bills like the Dod Frank Act, which is an 850 page bill with over 2,000 pages in interpretative regulations and has been properly identified as a "job killer" with its estimated effect of shutting down 1,000 American Banks as reported by Real Clear Markets, having direct impact on community banks en masse.

These initiatives to strip freedom away from the free-hand of the market and push forth government mandates on services and products at the expense of the taxpayer completely outlines my analysis of the political card trick known as the "Sleight of Hand".

From giving hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to foreign enemies, to issuing skyrocketing tax increases in an economically deprived market, to approving massive spending policies and offsetting it with rapid printing of new dollars (which depreciate the value of the American dollar in the global market), to allowing the executive branch to steamroll Congress through his bureaucratic minions, Congress has proven to be nothing more than feckless. Specifically, such initiatives to allow the empowering of government at the citizen's expense only appeals to the famous quote of Alexis de Tocqueville,

"The American Republic will endure until the day Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the public's money."

What a pile of clinking clanking caliginous junk! Had the Framers of the Constitution known what their most acclaimed creation would become, they would have overhauled the entire thing and started from square one.

A dictatorial Executive is dangerous, an uninhibited Supreme Court is malicious, but nothing is more lethal in our federalist system of checks and balances than a feckless Legislature. It is we the people that elect representatives to represent the constituents that elected them to office in the first place! Where did we go wrong? The answer is really quite simple:

The moment we allowed education of freedom to be handled by Washington's autocrats, is the moment we allowed Congress permission to become feckless in its representation. Congress was intended to be the most powerful branch of government because it is where the people of these United States truly had a voice. The time is ripe for constituents to hold these legislators to account for their recklessness in the handling of public policy, its handling of its own political clouts and its imposing of unbearable burdens upon the American business.

Congress is ideally the embodiment of the cardinal ethic that "the government only governs at the consent of the governed." Once Congress betrays the sacred trust that its constituents have entrusted in its representatives, which it has, the backlash would be considerably substantial. And now, with the 2016 elections concluded the people have finally answered back and have elected the populist Donald Trump as the 45th President of the United States, who has been likened to a molotov cocktail to be thrown into Washington D.C. to blow the whole system up.

For a clinking clanking collection of caliginous junk like Congress today, I wouldn't rest easy the morning of January 20th when President Trump and Vice-President Mike Pence take their oaths of office.

Thus was fulfilled the great declaration by President Abraham Lincoln, "

Let us pray that the new Congress being sworn in for the upcoming year will change the course of the legislature and retake its position as the most powerful and most representative branch of our Constitutional government.