A Legislature That Has Stopped Legislating.

Congress has not passed a regular budget on time since 1996. It has not declared war since 1942. It has substituted continuing resolutions, omnibus packages, executive AUMFs, and judicial deference for its own enumerated powers. The reforms here are about restoring Congress as a working legislature: budget process, war powers, oversight, committee structure, and the conditions of representation itself — including a proposal to repeal direct Senate elections in favor of state-government appointment with a two-thirds recall mechanism, restoring the federalism check the Seventeenth Amendment removed. None of these reforms creates a new branch; all of them ask the existing one to do its job.