> In the US, Congress has quietly walked away from most of its former duties. Major policy changes once came through legislation like the Social Security Act of 1935, or the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or the Clean Air Act of 1970, or the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, or the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001. There have been no bills like these for a generation. Today, to the extent that policy changes, it is a result of executive agencies using powers granted by these 20th century laws, or federal judges reinterpreting their meaning. The most significant bills of my adult lifetime were the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act, both of 2010, and both were marginal updates to preexisting 20th century bureaucracies.