Charlie Savage’s latest analysis in The New York Times comes with the kind of headline one does not expect to see in a healthy and stable democracy: “Trump Brazenly Defies Laws in Escalating Executive Power Grab.” The piece notes that the American president has, among other things, “effectively nullified laws” that the White House doesn’t like.
The Times published a related report summarizing a variety of examples of the Republican administration’s “defiance of statutes.”
It’s not a short list. By some accounts, it’s not supposed to be. David Super, an administrative law professor at Georgetown Law School, told The Washington Post, in reference to the White House’s assault on the rule of law, “So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once.”
It was against that backdrop that Republican Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina was asked on Capitol Hill about the White House unilaterally taking steps to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development, despite federal laws about the USAID’s structure. Political Wire flagged the GOP senator’s amazing response:
Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) told NOTUS that even though what Elon Musk is doing is unconstitutional — ‘nobody should bellyache about that.’ He added: ‘That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense. But it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.’
As a rule, anytime a sitting federal lawmaker begins a sentence, “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense, but…” it’s an unsettling situation.
It is, however, becoming an increasingly familiar one. Early last week, for example, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and conceded that the president “technically” violated federal law when he fired a group of inspectors general without cause. The South Carolinian promptly endorsed the move anyway.
It’s a problem when congressional Republicans claim that Trump’s legally dubious abuses are permissible. But it’s a qualitatively different kind of problem when congressional Republicans agree that Trump’s abuses are illegal — and they simply don’t care.
It might seem like a lifetime ago, but during Barack Obama’s second term in the White House, a great many GOP lawmakers tried to convince the public that the Democrat was, as then-House Speaker Paul Ryan put it, “lawless.” Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas even wrote an op-ed in 2014 condemning the “imperial presidency of Barack Obama.”
Later that year, a guy by the name of Donald Trump turned to social media to express grave concerns that Obama was trying to “subvert the Constitution.”
More than a decade later, it appears the party’s perspective on imperial and lawless presidencies has evolved.
I spoke to a Capitol Hill source last week who said that the White House has started to see Congress as “a doormat.” It’s not that Trump dislikes lawmakers, per se — at least those in his own political party — it’s just that he sees them as an irrelevant afterthought.
NBC News’ Ryan Nobles appeared on “Meet the Press” earlier this week and said that some GOP lawmakers have learned about the president’s major moves on policy “when we tell them in the hallways of Congress.” In other words, Trump and his team aren’t just indifferent to congressional approval of their agenda, they also don’t bother to even notify their own allies on Capital Hill about the administration’s actions.
As a historical matter, members of Congress have taken at least some institutional pride in response to such affronts. Congress is, after all, a coequal branch of government. It has enormous powers in the federal system, including oversight authority over the White House, among other things. Common sense might suggest that Republicans would at least take a passing interest in executive actions they know to be illegal, if for no other reason than to bolster their own relevance in our constitutional system. But they prefer to shrug their shoulders. Officials who’ve traditionally been among the most powerful figures in the nation are content to play the role of backup dancers in Trump’s corrupt production. This has hardly gone unnoticed. “Republicans take a back seat as Trump steamrolls Congress with flurry of unilateral moves,” read an NBC News headline. “The GOP’s meek acquiescence to Trump’s power grabs,” read a Washington Post headline. “Trump Kicks Aside Congress With Sweeping Claims of Presidential Power,” read a Wall Street Journal headline. “Trump Kicks Congress to the Curb, With Little Protest From Republicans,” a New York Times headline read. GOP leaders have no doubt seen some or all of these reports. They continue to take a cowardly and passive approach to their responsibilities anyway. If you haven’t read the book, “How Democracies Die,” by Harvard professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the basic idea is that modern democracies haven’t generally collapsed at the hands of a military coup or an armed revolution. Rather, democracies break down gradually when public institutions and political norms are weakened from within, and people in positions of power make a choice to allow authoritarian figures to concentrate power. It’s gutting to watch congressional Republicans follow that playbook to the letter.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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