[mindslight]

No and no. I'm referring to Gingrich's attitude of never crossing the aisle leading to Congressional gridlock. And how a functioning Congress could have easily passed laws nullifying most executive orders (especially the ones grabbing extra power). It was precisely the power vacuum of Congress that enabled the strong executive.

[_heimdall]

Anyone in congress can cross the aisle though, the hesitation to do so isn't unique.

I do agree though that inept congresses has allowed the executive branch to act so powerfully. My only caveat is that congress first had to give those powers to the executive such that they could eventually be abused. Earlier congresses didn't have to choose to empower the executive branch with so much authority.

[mindslight]

The ability wasn't unique, but how much it was used as part of an deliberate overall strategy was. Even recently, half of the introspection articles for why the democrats lost the election are asking how they can compromise with republicans more.

I don't really buy the argument the argument that earlier congresses should have foreseen their future inability to pass new legislation and done more to preemptively restrict how the executive could have abused general mandates. Passing highly specific fine grained laws would have been ineffective, both in the work required to foresee and draft all the specifics, and also having a few words changed here and there by lobbyists, completely undermining the intent. Congress could have delegated rule making to some sort of sub-legislative body rather than interpretation by the executive, but as I said that would have required them to foresee the gridlock that would leave them unable to clarify. Also, the possibility of having an outright-hostile-to-America-as-they-understand-it executive would have been pretty foreign to them.