Trump wanted unlimited power. Biden and Congress can ensure no president gets it.

Nearly four months into the 117th Congress, not a single structural executive branch reform has made it to the president’s desk. Indeed, other than a handful of important but modest ethics reforms in H.R. 1, which the House passed on March 3 and which is currently stalled in the Senate, no reforms have made it out of either chamber of Congress. What seemed as recently as January like an obvious path to meaningful reforms with bipartisan consensus has all but disappeared from public view... The best person to make this argument isn’t any individual member of Congress; it’s Biden himself. It might seem strange at first blush for a president to come out in support of limiting his own powers, but there’s an important precedent for just that: President Jimmy Carter. Carter, elected in 1976 as the nation was still reeling from Watergate and some of the worst intelligence scandals in American history, was instrumental in the enactment of some of the most important statutory constraints on the executive branch in the last half-century... More than that, Biden campaigned for president, heavily, on the idea of restoring consensus in Washington. Some of that, of course, is (and was always going to be) a fool’s errand. But these reforms are the one topic on which such consensus should be possible — all the more so if the president of the United States is inviting members of the opposite party to constrain his power. And Biden was vice president during the Obama administration — where he got to see firsthand just how quickly the window can close for meaningful structural reforms even during a two-term presidency. That window hasn’t closed yet. But as we approach the 100th day of the Biden administration, it’s time for these reforms to become a priority, too.