To lower the temperature of political rhetoric, we must lower the stakes of presidential elections

In the days since a Pennsylvania man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, barrels of ink have been spilled lamenting the heat of political rhetoric, entreating restraint from all sides.

The precise motivation of the would-be assassin is unknown, but the rapidly forming consensus is that our overheated election rhetoric makes political violence like this more likely. As one man put it to The Guardian, when the country’s political temperature is at a fever pitch, “you’re going to get a crazy doing something crazy.” The result has been a flood of calls from left, right, and center to turn down the temperature. But they miss an important fact: if you want to turn down the heat of rhetoric around elections, you must also lower the stakes.  

The supercharged rhetoric of our presidential elections mirrors the supercharged powers of the modern presidency. It reflects something real. The accumulation of enormous power in the hands of the hundreds of executive branch agencies that control much of our lives means that every change in presidential administration threatens a wholesale remaking of scads of policy questions. Environmental regulations, immigration, gun control, energy production, education, and antitrust enforcement are only a few of the hundreds. Once taking office, every administration sets out to remake the landscape of federal policy to its liking.  

As Yuval Levin notes in American Covenant, part of why the founders lodged the lawmaking power in Congress was to require policy questions to be answered in a forum that requires consensus-building and buy-in from more than one person at the top. Congress is designed to frustrate the ambitions of political factions who seek to run roughshod over the last election’s losers to get anything and everything they want right now. That’s why Congress has two chambers elected for different terms and in different ways and a history of rules that slow the process down and give a voice to the minority party. 

And that is the whole point. A fleeting majority for any party shouldn’t have a blank check to rewrite the entirety of federal regulations. If we rigorously abide by the Constitution and insist that only Congress make law, there would be far less at stake in any given election.  

Hopefully, recent Supreme Court decisions will encourage Congress to reprise its role at the center of American government. At a minimum, the Court’s repeated rebukes of executive overreach should tamp down that branch’s ambition.  

The Court’s decision in Loper Bright means that courts will no longer rubberstamp regulatory agencies’ interpretations of vague statutes — what was known as Chevron deference.  

Before Loper Bright, agencies would issue new interpretations — often completely counter to the previous interpretation — of decades-old statutes with each new administration Chevron then required the courts to defer to the new interpretation so long as it was “reasonable.”  

Consider the definition of “Waters of the United States” in the Clean Water Act: The Trump administration adopted a new interpretation that was incompatible with the definition the EPA had followed in the Obama administration. Then, when President Biden was elected, the agency put out yet another interpretation that was closer to the Obama-era understanding but still distinct. Chevron deference required courts to endorse each of these interpretations even though they couldn’t possibly all be a true reflection of the law. 

Now, courts will decide for themselves what the law means without putting a thumb on the scale for the agency’s view.  

That means the president will have less power to deploy his pen and phone to get whatever he wants without Congress. On the other hand, Congress must be more specific about what it wants the executive branch to do when it writes laws.  

Loper Bright isn’t the only Supreme Court case of recent vintage that could contribute to lowering the stakes of presidential elections. The Court’s Major Questions Doctrine rulings in cases like last year’s student loan forgiveness lawsuits should make it much harder for presidents to stretch the text of old statutes to accommodate new programs. This term’s ruling in Corner Post may result in more scrutiny for executive branch actions, making it harder for them to evade judicial review.  

In these and other recent rulings, the Court has made clear that it must be Congress that does the hard work of making law. When the American people demand the government address some problem or another — and we have no shortage of problems that need addressing — it is their representatives in Congress who must do so.  

Only then will we have a government that is responsive to the people but doesn’t dominate their lives. Only then can we begin to restore a political culture that is less apocalyptic, one that doesn’t inflame both sides by assuring them that every election spells either doom or salvation for the country.  

It’s far from a silver bullet. There wasn’t any one thing that got us to where we are and there isn’t any one thing that will fix it. There are only steps in the right direction. But if Congress can find within itself the will to do its job, we may see the stakes of presidential elections lower and the temperature of our rhetoric cool.