Steve Chapman: Congress and the Supreme Court approve Donald Trump's drive for absolute power
President Donald Trump has mounted a ruthless onslaught on the checks and balances established in the Constitution. He has dismantled agencies created by Congress, refused to carry out spending mandated by law, imposed tariffs with wild abandon, fired civil servants despite their statutory job protections, defied court orders and trampled on due process like a herd of buffalo.
The June 14 'No Kings' rally expressed a belief that Trump is rendering obsolete. Conservatives claim to favor limited government, but this president recognizes no limits — and rarely encounters one. He assumes, with good reason, that he can get away with almost anything.
Under our system of separation of powers and checks and balances, Congress and the Supreme Court are supposed to restrain the president's worst impulses. As James Madison wrote: 'The constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other.'
The framers of the Constitution divided responsibility among three branches of government, trusting that each would respond to encroachments by the others the way a grizzly bear would respond to a punch in the snout.
'Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,' Madison wrote.
In that expectation, recent experience has proved them wrong. Under Trump, Congress has behaved like an indentured servant rather than an independent agent. In theory, the legislative branch has ample means to counter and even dominate the president. But under GOP control, it has been cheerfully supine.
House Speaker Mike Johnson bears no resemblance to past speakers who pushed back even against presidents of their own party. Barack Obama had barely moved into the White House before then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi parted ways on Iraq, tax policy and the prosecution of officials from the George W. Bush administration. When he forged a historic free trade agreement with 11 other Pacific nations, Democrats in Congress told him to pound sand.
Johnson, by contrast, summed up his posture this way: 'Do not doubt, do not second-guess and don't ever challenge the president of the United States, Donald Trump.' Asked about reports that Trump was negotiating with Hamas, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said, 'I don't mind what Trump does, because I trust Trump.'
Republicans in Congress generally break with Trump only when they are yearning to return to private life — such as North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis, who voted against the president's mammoth tax and spending bill just before announcing that he would not seek reelection.
But Congress' fawning compliance is not the most alarming development. What's worse is the eagerness of the Supreme Court's conservative justices to accommodate Trump in even the most extreme cases.
Under federal indictment last year, Trump claimed that a president should enjoy lifetime immunity for any and all felonies he commits in the exercise of his official duties. In one of the most astonishing decisions in our history, the Supreme Court, by a 6-3 vote, agreed.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor outlined the implications in her dissent: 'When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy's Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.'
Last week, the court once again capitulated to Trump, ruling that lower courts may not block nationwide enforcement of unconstitutional presidential measures — in this instance, the attempt to repeal the 14th Amendment guarantee of citizenship to every baby born in America. The effect will be to empower every president to violate any right — freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to bear arms, protection against unreasonable searches, equal protection — with impunity.
Trump wants to handcuff lower courts, and the majority of justices are fine with that. In her dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asserted that for the rule of law to survive, 'courts must have the power to order everyone (including the Executive) to follow the law — full stop. To conclude otherwise is to endorse the creation of a zone of lawlessness within which the Executive has the prerogative to take or leave the law as it wishes, and where individuals who would otherwise be entitled to the law's protection become subject to the Executive's whims instead.'
Under Trump, those whims have proved more brazen, brutal and destructive than the nation has ever seen. The question is not whether Congress or the Supreme Court has the power to stop him but whether they will ever use it. The answer so far: not a chance.
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