May 21, 2012 5:26PM # Is Congress Doomed? By [John Samples](https://www.cato.org/people/john-samples) --- SHARE Maybe not. I have just published an [essay](http://libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/first-among-equals-reconsidering-congressional-power-in-james-burnhams-congress-and-the-american-tradition/) at the Liberty Fund’s [Liberty Forum](http://libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/) on the fall and rise of Congress since 1960. The essay takes off from James Burnham’s book of that year, *Congress and the American Tradition*. Burnham was what today would be called a paleo-conservative (despite having been a Trotskyite in the 1940s). He distrusted the executive branch and foresaw an imperial presidency more than a decade before that term became au courant. Burnham saw Congress as the center of the American way of governing and lamented its decline since 1932. My essay drew responses from [Herman Belz](http://libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/congress-and-the-constitutions-tradition-of-liberty/) and [John Marini](http://libertylawsite.org/liberty-forum/can-congress-survive/). ##### Related Tags [Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies](https://www.cato.org/robert-levy-center-constitutional-studies) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).