The very idea that our republic’s future hangs on the outcome of a single presidential contest, however, reveals the deeper, unacknowledged, underlying danger: a Congress incapable of performing its constitutional duties as our country’s lawmaking body and the guarantor of our representative democracy.

 If Congress is a nonfactor, with members performing as noisy but mostly irrelevant partisan foot soldiers, then getting your preferred candidate into the Oval Office is the only way to advance the causes you care about or defend the principles you cherish most. That explains the panic (on both sides) at the prospect of losing the presidential race. And these feelings of dread explain the embrace of extreme tactics in the pursuit of victory, including talking ourselves into the idea that America is on the precipice.

People who have given themselves over to hysterical presidentialism are reacting to a caricature of the legislative branch as impotent. But it is a caricature with some real resemblance to reality because Congress – especially the House – has been hollowed out.