> congress was supposed to be the most powerful branch

Just re-read the USA constitution. Despite much effort, I did not find any "power rankings" of the three branches. Please point me in the right direction.

Obviously the one which sets the law, also the one which has first article dedicated to it.

It was written before Dragonball Z existed so they didn't have the convenient framework of "power level" to use. Instead the power of Congress is indicated by the fact that all acts of the government are derived from bills originating in Congress, which the president rubber stamps (or not, which congress can then override), and the supreme court judicially interprets - but only if someone brings suit.

Now the president can do police actions and stuff but it seems like the intention was congress being the branch that had independent autonomy to just do things and get the ball rolling.

Congress sets the president's salary and has the power to fire him. The president has no such reverse power. The legislative branch is clearly the more powerful. "co-equal" is a fiction made up out of whole cloth by Nixon to further his criminal activities.

Until the party system existed, this was true. As soon as the party system evolved (pretty much immediately), with the President nominally the head of the party and the President has at least 1/3 of the Senate, the President comes near to immune from dismissal.

At that point, combined with the recent Supreme Court decisions holding 'official acts' as non-prosecutable, has swung the power meter severely to the executive.

Really? You read the constitution and managed to not absorb how the system is structured?

Hint: Look at who has which powers. Congress has the power to check every other branch. Neither the President nor the courts have symmetrical power over Congress. This asymmetry reflects its position.

I must admit I am a bit flabbergasted. How can you not understand what you read? And if a portion of Hacker News users, who are likely to have above average cognitive ability, don’t understand this, how poorly does the rest of the population understand the core ideas of how their political system works?

I'm not sure which Constitution you read but apparently it was a different one than the one I read.

Congress was not set up to be more powerful than the other branches. The president can veto laws that Congress tries to pass and the Supreme Court can also completely undo laws that Congress has passed.

Then you read it, but understood nothing. Perhaps you should have some remedial civics classes?