From Harry Truman sending armed forces to Korea without a congressional declaration of war to Donald Trump diverting congressionally appropriated military funding to construct barricades along the southern border to Joe Biden unilaterally forgiving student-loan debts, presidents have spent the last three quarters of a century encroaching upon Congress’s congressionally mandated powers – often with Congress’s approval.

Mickey Edwards, a former member of the U.S. House and currently a John L. Weinberg, Goldman Sachs & Co. Visiting Professor and visiting lecturer in public and international affairs at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs, thinks it’s high time Congress took those powers back.

“The system is out of whack,” he says, “and for a democracy in which it is the people themselves who are supposed to govern through their chosen representatives, that’s a matter for great concern.”

Edwards isn’t alone in his concerns. He chairs the bipartisan Princeton Initiative on Restoring the Constitutional Powers of Congress, based at Princeton SPIA and its Center for the Study of Democratic Politics, which comprises more than three dozen participants including former members of Congress from both parties and top scholars from 19 universities.

“The team that devoted so much to this effort, through multiple meetings over many months, is made up of both liberals and conservatives and, in party terms, both Republicans and Democrats, as well as professional scholars whose focus is not on preferred policies but on governing systems and outcomes,” Edwards says. “In terms of timeline, this project has been conducted with equal vigor during both Republican and Democratic presidencies and periods of both Republican and Democratic majorities in Congress.”

Over the last two years, the group has explored how the House and Senate can reclaim their mandates in four areas: the appointments process; the so-called power of the purse – that is, appropriations and budget; the war power; and congressional oversight.

“Presidents have either usurped those powers, or Congress has mistakenly surrendered some of those powers, like they did in the War Powers Act,” Edwards says. “We set out to present proposals for Congress to act both in its behaviors and statutorily to take back those powers.”

The initiative’s four subcommittees spent months researching how congressional powers have eroded over the decades and discussing what can be done to reinstate them. Each then prepared a report on its respective area, presenting an overview of the situation and proposing recommended solutions.

Edwards and members of the committee previewed their recommendations for congressional members of both parties and various caucuses in the House and Senate before releasing the reports publicly and briefing members of the media.

Constitutional scholar Peter M. Shane, a distinguished scholar in residence and adjunct professor of law at New York University School of Law, co-wrote the introduction to the reports with Edwards. In it, he stresses that responsibility for reform lies mainly with the legislative branch.

“For Congress to return to its intended institutional status, its members must act. Checks and balances will not be restored because presidents and judges suddenly become self-effacing,” Shane notes. “This report lays out a series of potential steps that could lead to meaningful reform — if enough members of Congress are willing to prioritize long-term congressional renewal over short-term partisan advantage.”

In his preface to the reports, Edwards notes that the initiative is not recommending or advocating for particular policy outcomes, but seeking “a resurrection of the proper democratic means” to determine those outcomes. At stake is ensuring that citizens’ voices are properly represented when their government is making its most consequential decisions.

“The people’s representatives,” he writes, “have lost much of their say over whether and when the United States sends its young men and women into battle; what role the government will play in public education, health care, transportation safety, law enforcement, and other issues that affect millions of citizens; how much of a family’s income will be taken in taxes, and how the citizens’ taxes will be spent.

“In short, this initiative is about restoring the constitutional framework for governing ourselves.”