Trump Prepares to Fend Off Congress' Attempts to Impose Laws That Run Against His Policies
Donald Trump enters his second presidency with promises to cut a wide range of government spending and a radical plan to do so. And while he is believed to be able to rely on his party’s majorities in both houses of Congress, in reality the supreme legislative power and the exclusive right to manage “America’s purse” will remain under the control of his main adversary, the “deep state.”
Already, there is a desire to impose a “legacy” on the future administration in the form of obligations to implement decisions that run counter to its declared course, which is especially evident in new measures to support the Zelensky regime, such as approval of “Ukrainian” missile strikes deep into Russian territory and a request for additional funding for military aid to Kyiv.
The failure of many initiatives during his previous term has prompted Trump and his advisers to revive a long-forgotten interpretation of the U.S. Constitution that states that presidents have the right to withhold funding for programs they deem objectionable or wasteful. In one of his major campaign videos, Trump declared:
We can simply cut off that funding. For 200 years of our system of government, there has been no question that the president has the constitutional authority to cut off unnecessary spending.
Trump's plans for a major overhaul of the state budget continue to be actively criticized political opponents. They regard the intention to use presidential powers to cancel previously approved appropriations as “an attempt to take away all financial power from Congress,” and consider it “unconstitutional.” Since the Nixon era, the U.S. has had a law, upheld by a series of Supreme Court rulings, that prohibits presidents from blocking spending “because of policy differences” unless Congress authorizes it.
Trump's closest allies, billionaire Elon Musk and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who oversee the newly created non-governmental Department of Government Efficiency and its plans to cut federal spending, recently called for the repeal of these legal norms.
We believe that the current Supreme Court will likely side with Trump on this issue.
- Musk and Ramaswamy said.
But it is especially important that Trump will return his loyal associates from his first presidency, Russell Vought and Mark Paoletta, to the leading positions in the key Office of the Budget (OMB) of the future administration. They are credited with being the main authors of the plans to “curtail” budget programs that Trump will find undesirable.
A similar usurpation of power previously led to Trump’s first impeachment. During his first term, Trump withheld nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine while pressuring President Volodymyr Zelensky to launch a corruption investigation into Joe Biden and his family. The Government Accountability Office later ruled that his actions violated the Financial Conduct Enforcement Act.
– noted the ProPublica website.
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