Americans and the media are preoccupied with the 2024 presidential race. Down-ballot contests are treated like stepchildren. Why? Most voters believe the White House is the giant oak and all other offices tiny acorns in the presidential forest. But they are all wrong! Even Toscanini needed a supporting orchestra to create electrifying music.

The Constitution endows Congress with the power of the purse. The president may not spend a penny that Congress has not appropriated. James Madison, father of the Constitution, explained in Federalist No. 58, “This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”

Congress wrote the epitaph on the Vietnam War by prohibiting any expenditure of funds of the United States to support combat operations over Indochina after Aug. 15, 1973. Congress will decide whether to upgrade our nuclear arsenal by $1.7 trillion over 30 years, whether to continue to run trillion-dollar annual budget deficits pushing the national debt past $35 trillion, whether to spend annually $1.5 trillion on the multitrillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex, whether to augment or clip Social Security or food stamps, or whether to hike or reduce taxes on the rich, the middle-class or poor.

A related issue is tariffs. Former President Donald Trump has promised whopping tariffs (50% or more) on imports from China or elsewhere to protect manufacturing jobs in the United States, and Vice President Kamala Harris has not said whether she would reverse the Biden administration’s recent tariffs on China. But the decision ultimately rests with Congress under the Constitution. Punitive tariffs will spike inflation. They will probably provoke retaliatory tariffs from foreign nations and plunge U.S. exports, especially from the agricultural sector. Tariffs may be politically attractive, however, because the winner is the heavily unionized manufacturing sector, while the loser is the un-unionized farming sector.

Outside the power of the purse, Congress decides between a surveillance state and privacy. Do you want the FBI to seize your bank account, phone, email, texts or other messages communicated to third parties without a warrant? If so, just vote for the status quo in down-ballot races.

Artificial intelligence has grown from a minnow to a whale virtually overnight. It is largely unregulated because of its novelty and inscrutability to a large percentage of legislators. AI threatens to revolutionize virtually every aspect of modern life, including war, privacy, education, copyright, crime and electioneering. Congress, not the president, will dictate AI restraints to prevent a descent into dystopia.

We all know the importance of federal judges, especially the U.S. Supreme Court. A sample of the current issues pending in the federal judiciary concern abortion, transgender surgery, censorship in public school libraries, President Joe Biden’s serial gambits to forgive student debt, the fate of former President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals admittees, Bible teachings in public schools, and constitutional immunity for criminal presidential acts.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, with an accommodating Democratic-majority Senate, made nine Supreme Court appointments. All were stalwart New Dealers, and they remade constitutional law to conform with progressive values. Precedents fell like 10 pins. Trump’s three Supreme Court appointees, confirmed by a Republican-majority Senate, fueled the overruling of a constitutional right to an abortion. In 1986, if the Senate had remained in the hands of Republicans, Ronald Reagan’s nomination of Robert H. Bork to the Supreme Court would have been confirmed rather than rejected, changing the course of constitutional history.

In Senate races, voters should consider whether Republicans rather than Democrats should control the face of the federal judiciary going forward.

The Supreme Court’s abandonment of the Chevron doctrine last spring shifted legislative power away from the White House and back to Congress and the federal courts. Congress will now be the impresario in making the chief tradeoffs between environmental protection and economic growth, a leadfooted green economy or a mercury-footed free market alternative.

Finally, down-ballot races for state legislatures will be decisive in the prominence of partisan political gerrymandering in drawing federal and state legislative districts to favor either Republicans or Democrats. The Supreme Court has renounced federal constitutional limits on the practice. Both parties do it when in control of a state legislature. Most states permit it under state constitutions.

In sum, ignore down-ballot races at your peril.

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