The House leader Johnson and Senate Leader Thune ARE Missing with NO Action….
Both Republicans seem to be afraid to step up and assert the Power of the America Legislative Branch against a run amuck President, of their party , who happens to be a convicted criminal STILL trying to dodge the Law…
As for the Democrats?
They have also been strangly silent ….
In the United States, we have three branches of government. Or we’re supposed to have three branches of government.
We certainly do have an executive branch. Its leaders are up to no good. As Don Kettl, perhaps the dean of public administration scholars, explains in an important new article, President Trump and his apparatchiks are seeking to transform the executive branch into something almost unrecognizable in our history and into something inconsistent with our constitutional order.
You may see articles arguing that one action or another action taken by Trump resembles something that a previous administration did. That totally, completely misses what’s happening. The Trump restoration is simply unlike anything that we’ve ever seen before. It’s singularly, startlingly focused on increasing the president’s power . . .
Kettl elaborates on some of the Trump team’s particular efforts, and shows how they all add up:
It’s as if Trump has dumped the pieces of the world’s biggest jigsaw puzzle across the streets of Washington: Everyone is chasing around the individual pieces, while only the Trump team has a sense of how all the pieces fit together. . . . The Trump team already knows what they want it to look like—they’ve seen the picture on the outside of the box.
And the president’s team is acting aggressively and purposefully to bring that picture to life. They’re trying, as two sober and distinguished constitutional scholars—Adam Cox and Trevor Morrison of NYU Law School—have put it, to implement “Trump’s Dictatorial Theory of Presidential Power.”
So we clearly have an executive branch hard at work. We also have a judicial branch.
And much of what Team Trump is trying to do will end up there, in the courts. Indeed, some of the pieces of Donald Trump’s jigsaw puzzle are already there.
One hopes judges won’t shrink from upholding the Constitution against executive usurpation. But there are structural limits to what judges can do. They can only deal with the cases that are presented to them, and while they can delay or strike down executive actions, they can’t really reshape them or prevent further and similar efforts.
This is to say nothing of the fact that our current Supreme Court is not a reliable ally of the Constitution against Trump, and the federal courts in general are going to look different after being subject to Trump nominations over the next four years.
The courts can’t be expected to rebuff Trump’s attempted usurpation alone.
This brings us to our third branch, Congress.
The legislative branch has the honor of being the first branch of the government specified in the Constitution. Article I informs us that “All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.”
One of the most crucial of those powers is the appropriation of funds to be expended by the executive branch, the specification of how those funds are to be used by the executive, and oversight of their use.
These core legislative powers are what Trump and his minions are seeking to usurp.
You’d think that Congress would be up in arms about its fundamental power being ripped away by another branch.
Nope.
Speaker of the House Mike Johnson says he “fully support[s]” the administration’s dramatic attempt to pause and place new conditions on, and ultimately redirect, federal grants and other funding. And when asked about the legality of the White House directing agencies not to spend funds appropriated by Congress, Rep. Tom Cole, chair of the House Appropriations Committee, explains that it is a “legitimate exercise of executive oversight” and that “appropriations is not a law, it’s the directive of Congress.”
In fact, Cole knows perfectly well that appropriations measures passed by Congress are laws. The Constitution makes it clear: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.”
Over in the Senate, Majority Leader John Thune is more long-winded than his House counterparts but no more willing to take a stand in defense of congressional authority: “This is not unusual for an administration to pause funding and to take a hard look and scrub of how these programs are being spent and how they interact with a lot of the executive orders that the president signed.” You really have to be trying hard not to see what’s happening to say that “this is not unusual.”
Now these are of course Republicans. As Republicans in the era of Trump, they perhaps can’t be expected to stand up for the prerogatives of their branch, and to defend our Constitution against “their” president. But congressional Democrats have been strikingly half-hearted in their expressions of opposition as well.
So Congress has gone missing in action—in a dramatic and important moment when Congress needs to play a key role.
Could that change?
Note….
US Mid-Term Elections ARE in less than 2 years……
image…Mike Johnson was among the many Republican Hill leaders who brushed off the Trump White House’s freeze of federal grant funds. | Mark Schiefelbein/AP
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