“Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, reported on Monday that he had been added by National Security Adviser Mike Waltz to an encrypted Signal group chat with the White House’s principals committee to discuss U.S. war plans in Yemen. Goldberg received the first message at 11:44 a.m. on Saturday, March 15, and around two hours later, the White House announced a new air campaign against Houthi forces. The National Security Council confirmed the group chat was real and claimed Goldberg was added by accident.”
…
“The constitutional and policy merits of war are two separate questions, but they’re impossible to fully disentangle. The point of asking Congress for a declaration of war is to allow the people’s representatives to weigh the pros and cons in a deliberate, transparent way. War is the most serious decision a government can make. Citizens of a republic should not have to perform Kremlinology—or wait for an official to fat-finger his contact list—to figure out what their leaders are planning.”
““We can simply choke off the money,” Trump said in a 2023 campaign video. “For 200 years under our system of government, it was undisputed that the president had the constitutional power to stop unnecessary spending.”
His plan, known as “impoundment,” threatens to provoke a major clash over the limits of the president’s control over the budget. The Constitution gives Congress the sole authority to appropriate the federal budget, while the role of the executive branch is to dole out the money effectively. But Trump and his advisers are asserting that a president can unilaterally ignore Congress’ spending decisions and “impound” funds if he opposes them or deems them wasteful.
Trump’s designs on the budget are part of his administration’s larger plan to consolidate as much power in the executive branch as possible.”
…
“The prospect of Trump seizing vast control over federal spending is not merely about reducing the size of the federal government, a long-standing conservative goal. It is also fueling new fears about his promises of vengeance.”
…
“Trump and his aides claim there is a long presidential history of impoundment dating back to Thomas Jefferson.
Most historical examples involve the military and cases where Congress had explicitly given presidents permission to use discretion, said Zachary Price, a professor at the University of California College of the Law, San Francisco. Jefferson, for example, decided not to spend money Congress had appropriated for gun boats — a decision the law, which appropriated money for “a number not exceeding fifteen gun boats” using “a sum not exceeding fifty thousand dollars,” authorized him to make.
President Richard Nixon took impoundment to a new extreme, wielding the concept to gut billions of dollars from programs he simply opposed, such as highway improvements, water treatment, drug rehabilitation and disaster relief for farmers. He faced overwhelming pushback both from Congress and in the courts. More than a half dozen federal judges and the Supreme Court ultimately ruled that the appropriations bills at issue did not give Nixon the flexibility to cut individual programs.
Vought and his allies argue the limits Congress placed in 1974 are unconstitutional, saying a clause in the Constitution obligating the president to “faithfully execute” the law also implies his power to forbid its enforcement. (Trump is fond of describing Article II, where this clause lives, as giving him “the right to do whatever I want as president.”)
The Supreme Court has never directly weighed in on whether impoundment is constitutional. But it threw water on that reasoning in an 1838 case, Kendall v. U.S., about a federal debt payment.
“To contend that the obligation imposed on the President to see the laws faithfully executed, implies a power to forbid their execution, is a novel construction of the constitution, and entirely inadmissible,” the justices wrote.”
“In a near party-line vote.., the House of Representatives blocked the most direct pathway for lawmakers to revoke the emergency executive powers Trump used last month to impose tariffs on goods from Canada, Mexico, and China. That change helps further cement executive control over trade policy and creates additional challenges for lawmakers seeking to claw back some control over tariff decisions.”
“The Senate minority leader, both privately to his caucus Thursday and in a floor speech shortly after, said he would vote to advance a GOP-written stopgap to fund the government through September. He said Republicans’ spending bill is “very bad.” But he argued the “potential for a shutdown has consequences for America that are much, much worse” and would empower President Donald Trump and Elon Musk to further gut federal agencies.”
“Senate Democratic Minority Leader Chuck Schumer sought to break Democrats out of their unenviable political box on Wednesday, warning that the 60 votes needed to pass the funding bill do not yet exist. He called for a separate one-month extension with identical spending allocations as those currently in force to allow for bipartisan negotiations. “We should vote on that. I hope, I hope our Republican colleagues will join us to avoid a shutdown on Friday,” Schumer said on Wednesday.”
…
“Democrats would also be hoping to put pressure on Johnson and to make him face a backlash for sending his members home.”
“It took an all-out lobbying blitz that involved promises of future spending cuts, a scattering of presidential threats and 11th-hour policy concessions involving tariffs and visas for Afghan refugees. But in a 217-213 vote, the House passed a seven-month funding patch without needing a single Democrat. Republicans planned to immediately leave Washington and hand Senate Democrats a stark dilemma with the threat of a government shutdown looming early Saturday morning.”
“We’ve studied democratic erosion in countries around the world, and our research has found that the most important bulwark against an elected leader undermining democracy doesn’t come from opposition parties or pro-democracy activists. It comes from the ruling party — and particularly the powerful elites in that party — and their efforts to constrain their own leader.
The danger to democracy is particularly acute in political systems led by parties where leaders wield disproportionate influence relative to the political parties that back them — as is now the case in the Republican Party. Our data on all democratically elected leaders around the globe in the 30 years since the end of the Cold War show that where leaders dominate the parties they lead, the chances of democratic backsliding increase, whether it’s through gradual democratic decay or a rapid collapse.
In the United States, we tend to assume that constitutional checks and balances, including the powers vested in Congress or the Supreme Court, play the central role in constraining a rogue executive and any power grab they might attempt. But we’ve found that institutions can do so only if the members of the president’s party inside those institutions are willing to use their authority in the face of executive abuses or overreach.
The reason that often doesn’t happen is because when a political party becomes dominated by the leader as an individual, party figures view their political fates as directly tied to that of the leader, not to the long-term reputation of the party, and so they are unwilling to push back against the leader’s actions. In these “personalist” political parties, the party elite are even willing to go along with a leader’s abuse of power if they see that doing so is advantageous for keeping their jobs.
The impact affects more than just the political class. When prominent party figures tolerate — or indeed even support — a leader’s anti-democratic actions, it fosters public acceptance of those actions among party supporters, as people take important cues from their elected officials. High levels of polarization and the resulting disdain for the other side only make matters worse, as partisans are willing to accept abuses of power if it means keeping the other side out of office. Indeed, even when there remains a high level of public support for democracy, our research shows that societies can slide down a non-democratic path simply because they don’t want the other side to win.”
Republicans in Congress are not acting like a co-equal branch designed to be a check on power grabs from the president. They are acting like a non-person character, or a non-person Congress.