Under GOP, Congress cedes power to Trump, eroding its influence

Washington: The Republican-led Congress isn't just watching the Trump administration gobble up its constitutional powers. It is enthusiastically turning them over to the White House.

GOP lawmakers are doing so this week by embracing a stopgap spending bill that gives the administration wide discretion over how federal dollars are distributed, in effect handing off the legislative branch's spending authority to President Donald Trump.

But that is just one example of how Congress, under unified Republican control, is proactively relinquishing some of its fundamental and critical authority on oversight, economic issues and more.

As they cleared the way for passing the spending measure Tuesday, House Republican leaders also quietly surrendered their chamber's ability to undo Trump's tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China in an effort to shield their members from having to take a politically tough vote.

That switched off the only legislative recourse that Congress has to challenge the tariffs that are all but certain to have a major impact on their constituents.

Republicans have also stood by, many of them cheering, as the administration has upended federal departments and programs funded by Congress and fired thousands of workers with no notice to or consultation with the lawmakers charged with overseeing federal agencies.

So far, no congressional committee has held an oversight hearing to scrutinize the moves or demand answers that would typically be expected when an administration undertakes such major changes.

"This is us, in a sense, giving the keys to the president to be able to continue to do the great work that they're doing," Rep. Michael Cloud, R-Texas, said this week. Cloud, who rarely votes in favor of spending bills, was explaining his support for the stopgap funding measure the House passed this week and is pending in the Senate.

The sentiment he described encapsulates the overarching attitude of Republicans in Congress at the dawn of Trump's second term, as they happily acknowledge they are turning control over to the president, who in turn is benefiting from perhaps the most compliant Congress in history.

"They are actively giving it away," Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., said of his Republican colleagues' attitude toward congressional authority. "And they are doing so in an atmosphere where it's clear this administration is willing to abuse the power they already have."

In the past, lawmakers of both parties have fiercely protected their turf, pushing back strongly at moments when presidents have attempted to usurp congressional prerogatives.

Members of Congress saw their place in Article I of the Constitution as reflecting their branch's primary importance in a system of checks balances, and saw the executive branch as meant to administer their designs. Presidents came and went, members would often say, while Congress remained a constant.

When the Reagan administration was suspected of illegally selling arms to Iran and diverting funds to Nicaraguan rebels, Congress in 1987 empowered a bipartisan, bicameral committee to conduct an inquiry.

When House Republicans believed the Obama administration was illegally spending money on health care subsidies, they filed suit in 2014 and won a federal ruling that "Congress is the only source for such an appropriation."

Even as recently 2017, when Republicans controlled Congress during Trump's first term, a Senate panel investigated whether Russia had interfered in the 2016 election to help his campaign, ultimately issuing a report that supported that finding.

With the House and Senate so polarized and legislative success so difficult to achieve in recent years, power has been inexorably gravitating down Capitol Hill toward occupants of the White House, which has been more than willing to try and exercise it with executive orders and other unilateral action.

But Trump is taking the shift to new levels, in part because of his iron grip on congressional Republicans, which he exercises through a combination of cultivating warm personal relationships with them and the constant threat that they will pay a hefty political price for crossing him.

Republicans dismiss the idea that they are giving the White House free rein. They say that the federal bureaucracy had become such a monolith that only radical action of the level being taken by Trump and his billionaire ally Elon Musk could produce meaningful change after decades of resistance and uncooperative agency officials.

And they say they will reassert control through upcoming budget and spending deliberations for 2026.

"This is the Super Bowl," Speaker Mike Johnson told Fox News in describing how Congress would work with Trump to change the way government functions. "This is the moment we've all been waiting for our entire careers, and finally, the stars have aligned so we can do that better."

But Trump, Musk and other top administration officials have made it clear that they have little regard for Congress' authority, and Johnson has positioned himself more as a subordinate to the president than the leader of a coequal branch of government with its own power. And once lawmakers have yielded their authority, they are likely to find it hard to claw it back, whether under Trump or a future president.

For the moment, Republicans do not appear to be concerned with the precedent they are setting. Conservative House GOP lawmakers who typically oppose appropriations bills backed this week's short-term spending bill precisely because it would hand Trump much of the authority for funding decisions that Congress would usually reserve for itself.

They said they were reversing themselves in part because the Trump administration had demonstrated it would disregard congressional instructions to allocate money for programs lawmakers voted to fund. Democrats cited that as a reason to reject the bill, but Republicans said it gave them confidence that the administration would withhold money and reduce spending no matter what Congress said.

"I think the comfort is that you've got leaders like Marco Rubio at the State Department who aren't going to spend the USAID money," Rep. Warren Davidson of Ohio, an ultraconservative, said, referring to the U.S. Agency for International Development. Trump has moved to defund the agency, prompting a legal battle over his power to refuse to spend congressionally appropriated funds.

Republicans' willingness to allow Trump and Musk to snatch away Congress' vaunted power of the purse has inflamed Democrats who argue that the GOP has enabled the power grab with a blank check short-term spending bill.

"House Republicans didn't merely refuse to address the lawlessness we have seen from Trump and Musk," said Sen. Patty Murray of Washington, the senior Democrat on the Appropriations Committee. "They would actually empower it with this bill, because House Republicans' bill fails to include the typical detailed spending directives, the basic guardrails that Congress provides each year in our funding bills."

Still, Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader, moved on Thursday to line up the votes to allow the stopgap funding bill to move forward in the Senate, arguing that a shutdown would actually cede even more power to Trump and Musk.

Congressional Republicans have also relinquished some of their power on economic issues. On Tuesday they gave up any possibility of holding a House vote this year to overturn tariffs enacted by the president. The power to impose such levies was originally vested with the legislative branch, but lawmakers over time have increasingly delegated it to the executive. Still, under current law, Congress can vote to undo tariffs imposed by the president.

Under language that GOP leaders tucked into a procedural measure this week, that law would effectively be nullified.

"They are abdicating their most important constitutional obligation: oversight over the executive branch on trade," said Rep. Richard E. Neal of Massachusetts, the top Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee who had led the effort to force a vote on resolutions to end the tariffs. "Republicans have unequivocally showed us who they are -- cowards who kowtow to the president on everything, including the economy."

In the past, Congress has typically called Cabinet secretaries and other high-ranking agency officials to the carpet to explain administrative overhauls of far less significance than the chaotic firings, program suspensions and funding cuts the Trump administration is now executing. There is no sign of that yet from the Republican Congress.

Democrats, relegated to the minority in both chambers, have no power to convene oversight hearings, and Republicans have quickly rebuffed their appeals and calls to subpoena Musk. Instead, GOP lawmakers have huddled with Musk behind closed doors and contented themselves with getting his cellphone number to raise any concerns they may have.

In their latest efforts to force scrutiny of Musk and the administration, Democrats on both the House Oversight and Ways and Means committees have pushed "resolutions of inquiry" to require the administration to provide extensive information about Musk's activities, including internal communications.

The resolutions carry special status that could force them to the House floor for votes. Republicans are unlikely to support them, but Democrats see them as another opportunity to highlight what Musk is up to and try to put Republicans on the record defending his work.