Trump’s Obsession With Executive Power Will Cost Him
After all, the next Democratic president will have all the same powers.
Some housekeeping at the top: Today is the last day of the Supreme Court’s term, and we’re expecting some blockbuster opinions, especially on the matter of Donald Trump’s unilateral attempt to end birthright citizenship. So instead of starting right at 10:00 a.m. EDT for Morning Shots Live as usual, Bill, Andrew, and Sam will be planning to go live as soon as that case drops and we’ve had a bit of time to chew it over. Watch this space! Happy Tuesday.
The Court Is (Kinda) on Trump’s Side
by Andrew Egger
Donald Trump has never been what you might call a subtle thinker, and his reaction to the Supreme Court’s decision yesterday in Trump v. Slaughter was characteristically blunt.
“90 years of precedent has been COMPLETELY AND UNEQUIVOCALLY OVERRULED, greatly increasing Presidential Power at a time when it is most needed,” the president exulted. “Today’s Historic Slaughter Decision by the Supreme Court is the Greatest Increase in Presidential Power in the last 100 years. Such a Monumental Ruling at such an important time!”
Many Trump foes have come to view this Court as a doormat for the president. This is dramatically overtorqued: The Court hasn’t been afraid to cross Trump on some of his biggest priorities, from the 2020 election to his signature “Liberation Day” tariffs to his mass deportation regime. Just yesterday, in a separate case, SCOTUS dealt Trump a major loss on the issue of mail-in ballots, ruling that he could not prevent states from accepting ballots postmarked by election day where that practice is consistent with their laws.
But there’s no question that this conservative Court has one ideological priority that aligns perfectly with Trump’s own. They see the independent agency structure—in which Congress impanels some regulatory body, gives them broad policy-setting and enforcement authorities, and insulates them from political accountability by setting up mechanisms that make their members difficult to fire—as inherently dubious under the Constitution.
Their decision in Slaughter yesterday, which greenlights Trump’s firing of a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, is the culmination of this view: Wherever Congress carves off portions of the executive power and enshrines it in regulatory bodies,1 the president must have the broad ability to hire and fire at those bodies, since the Constitution stipulates that he is the individual in which the executive power rests. Moreover, the logic goes, if the president is to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed” as the Constitution requires, he must have the power to remove people who are not faithfully executing the laws.
Trump, of course, cares little for these constitutional niceties. His view of presidential power has always been simple: The more the better. “I have an Article II,” he famously said in 2019, “where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” Whether the Court’s theory of the unitary executive is faithful to the Constitution or not, it’s plain that it sets this president up to do even more damage in the immediate term—and it’s hard to fault too much those who feel that the Supreme Court should look down from the horizon a bit to put up a little more hashtag #resistance to the would-be authoritarian we’ve got right this minute.
Still, the president’s exultation may not last long. He is, of course, too solipsistic to see it, but he isn’t going to be the president forever. In his shortsightedness, he has grown obsessed with changing the direction of the country via executive power alone. Twice now, he has come into office with Republican supermajorities in Congress, poised to remake the nation’s laws in durable ways. What does he have to show for it? A couple of tax-cut bills, one per term. Trump continues to show remarkable disdain for the sausage-making and horse-trading of the legislative process; just yesterday, he dismissed his own administration’s housing bill as “a yawn.”
But after he leaves office, his laws will be all he can count on remaining. Yes, the Supreme Court has made it easier for Trump to remake the government in his image for now. But they’ve done just as much to make it easier for the next Democratic president to blot out that image once he’s gone.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Who Gets to Claim 1776? If the republic is to last another 250 years, Americans need to see themselves in its origin story, argues LINDSAY M. CHERVINSKY (who will be joining MONA CHAREN for the next episode of the Bulwark Book Club later this week!).
The American Revolution Was So Much Weirder Than You Think… Alongside the Enlightenment reason we associate with the founding, there were mystics, occultists, and conspiracy theorists, writes NICOLE PENN.
The Wheels Are Coming Off Putin’s War… Amid fuel shortages, military unrest, and a strangled Crimea, the Kremlin dictator’s attempts to project confidence do nothing of the sort, reports CATHY YOUNG.
GOP Senator Cassidy Nukes Trump, RFK Jr., and Pulte… On Bulwark Takes, WILL SALETAN gives his take on Sen. Bill Cassidy’s remarkable CBS interview.
Quick Hits
NO-BID BALLROOM: Donald Trump once said that the construction company he’d picked for his East Wing ballroom project was willing “to do it for nothing.” But Clark Construction will, of course, be getting a little more than that. The Washington Post reports this morning that the builder got a no-bid contract for up to $500 million for the project “in an unusual arrangement that sidestepped typical contracting procedures designed to control costs”:
The White House routed the contract through the Executive Residence, the document shows, an office that is exempt from rules that require federal agencies to solicit competitive bids and disclose details to the public. The office is typically responsible for routine repairs, entertainment expenses, and the purchase of furniture, art and other items for the executive mansion. . . .
The East Wing contract is the latest example of the administration turning to no-bid deals to hasten a Trump-style makeover of the nation’s capital, which has included handpicking firms to upgrade Lafayette Square next to the White House and to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.
There’s no reason to believe that Clark Construction is playing dirty: The Post notes that its three-percent profit margin so far is in line with the norm for large government projects. But it’s just the latest example of the White House spurning the usual process for the sake of convenience and speed—at least until they run into trouble in the courts. And it gives yet more evidence to the lie, told repeatedly by Trump, that the ballroom would cost nothing to the taxpayer.
Federal-dollar penny-pinchers can take heart at one thing, however: Trump has been paying bizarrely close attention to certain nuts-and-bolts spending decisions in this case. “On March 4, days after the start of the war with Iran, Trump personally negotiated the price of concrete to be provided by one of Clark’s wholly owned subsidiaries, according to a summary of the terms that notes his involvement,” the Post notes. “The summary indicates the price, initially more than $47 million, dropped $2.3 million during the negotiation.” Art of the deal!
GALLEGO DOUBLE JEOPARDY: Rumors of sexual misconduct and campaign finance violations have swirled around Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) in recent weeks,2 but a Senate ethics panel cleared him yesterday of any wrongdoing, writing that they “did not find evidence that [his] actions violated Federal law, Senate rules, or related standards of conduct.”
Donald Trump’s Justice Department, however, wants to take another look. Axios reported yesterday that Gallego is now under federal investigation—again for supposed campaign finance violations reportedly stemming from his use of campaign funds for travel with his family.
Gallego isn’t taking it sitting down. “Trump is targeting Sen. Gallego while the most weaponized Department of Justice in history is turning a blind eye to Trump’s unprecedented corruption,” a spokesman told Axios. “It’s the least surprising news of the week that this comes immediately after the Senate Ethics Committee cleared Senator Gallego of right-wing smears pushed by the administration.”
ME AND MY BIG MOUTH: Remember when Donald Trump used the pretext of a government shutdown to try to freeze billions in federal funding for blue-state infrastructure projects, particularly in New York? Yesterday, a federal judge permanently blocked the move, ruling that the Transportation Department’s stated reason for the freeze—which supposedly involved checking it for forbidden DEI policies3—had been somewhat undercut but Trump’s own statements bragging about cutting the funds himself: “It’s terminated because the Democrats are so foolish. . . . Right now, there is no funding, because it’s up to me.”
“Defendants make no attempt to justify their actions as consistent with the governing federal regulations,” Judge Jeannette Vargas wrote in her ruling. It’s our latest reminder of a grim Trump-era comfort: If it is our lot to suffer through an honest-to-God attempted authoritarian takeover in America, at least we can console ourselves that the authoritarian in question is genuinely dumber than rocks.
Cheap Shots
With the interesting apparent exception, as we saw yesterday, of the Federal Reserve.
These rumors stemmed in part from Gallego’s close friendship with Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), whose career came to a stunning end last month when he resigned amid a sudden blizzard of sexual misconduct allegations.
lol. lmao.
I'm sure I will not be the only one to say this: So far we only know that the Supreme Court believes in *Republican* Presidents having Unitary Executive Power. We shall see how deeply they believe that (hopefully) in 2029
The Supreme Court has apparently decided that professional expertise gained over years, or even decades, in a specialized field is no longer an essential part of a functional government. So much for “merit”. We truly are going to descend to the levels of Soviet Russia, where cronyism takes the place of education and experience. We’ve already witnessed how adept this president has been at choosing his cabinet. We are a ship of fools, sailing directly at our demise. I’m so disgusted and disheartened.