Without the constitutional police to apply the fundamental laws of our country, the most practical control over a tyrannical president is the power of the congress handbag. And in the last two weeks, while the deadline of March 14 for having adopted a government financing bill is approaching, the Democrats of the Congress have evolved towards the affirmation of this power.
The Republicans need democratic votes to adopt a law on government -scale credits for the year 2025. Democrats have at the same way – that there is no point in giving the president a new budget if he continues to challenge the current one. They have clearly indicated that they will only help with the guarantees that Elon Musk’s law without law and Doge of funding approved by the congress will end and that each central congress will be spent as the Congress will lead.
So what’s going on?
The republican rescue position, because they will not resist Trump and Musk, was to abandon a new financing bill and to propose a continuous long -term resolution (or “CR”) instead. This would finance the government at the current levels and with the mandates of the existing congress until the end of September.
A CR could be considered a small victory for the Democrats. This would force Trump to live with a budget approved by Biden and prevent the Republicans from changing the levels of spending or imposing their ideological vision for the rest of the year. And the alternative is to let the government close.
But here is the problem: large parts of the government are closed anyway, by Trump and Musk, without the consent of the congress. Thus, a continuous resolution would only protect the parts of the government that Trump and Musk want to keep. It would finance several programs which do not actually continue.
For example, the CR will provide more than $ 40 billion to the USAID for public health, nutrition and support for democracy worldwide. It looks great! But USAID has been reduced to a shell, its subsidies end mainly, its staff mainly dismissed. The CR WILL GIVE $ 79 Billion to the Department of Education, Which the Trump Administration is Seeking to Elimate, $ 9 Billion to the Environmental Protection Agency, Which Its New Administrator, Lee Zeldin, Plans to Shrink by Two-Thirds, $ 47 Billion to the National Institute of Health, Though Much of its Funding for Research on Disseases Like Cancer and Alzheimer’s Has Been Frozen, and $ 684 million to the consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Though its head office has been closed.
And so on, and so on.
The dilemma for the Democrats who will be invited to vote for a continuous resolution is that this continuous resolution will be a lie – like sending tuition fees to a child who abandoned the school. With less judicial intervention or the congress, the power of the bag would have been largely transferred from the Congress to the billionaire and to its president of PET.
So what choices do Democrats have?
An option would be to swallow a CR at the end of the exercise. An argument on this would be that the maintenance of government financing on paper would help the complainants who try to persuade judges to rid the funds that Trump and Musk have already frozen. But the congress should not count entirely on the courts to save the day. While the Supreme Court ruled this week that USAID must honor its agreements with several humanitarian organizations, it was only to pay them for contractual work they had already carried out. Even then, four judges dissident of this close decision. Who knows how the Supreme Court will reign when the pivotal questions surrounding the fodder preceded it.
A better option for democrats would be to accept a much shorter CR – a month. This would allow Democrats to assess how legal battles take place and continue to negotiate a government financing bill with railing to make sure Trump really contained it.
As for these railings, there are several approaches to which democratic collectors have probably thought. The most obvious would be to reformulate and even strengthen the provisions of the current law on the control of furniture, which obliges the president to request the approval of the congress timely if he does not want to spend funds that Congress has approved for a program or a goal. But the administration already disobeys this law, which it considers unconstitutional, and the Republicans of the Congress have so far rejected any language which imposes additional requirements on the President.
I would suggest another approach, which would allow Congress without forcing Trump to do anything again – required the US controller (a non -partisan official appointed by the Congress) to make monthly reports detailing any recent presidential implementation of funds appropriate by the Congress.
This would be powerful because under the current law, these controller reports trigger a compulsory vote of the congress, and a pound is only considered legal if the Chamber and the Senate approve it. Makeing them monthly by the Republicans to take regular votes on Trump’s refusal to spend funds on everything, from research to cancer on wheels on wheels to the implementation of the flea law.
Finally, democrats have a nuclear option – to refuse to pass a CR and allow the government to close until the Republicans accept such guarantees. They could exercise it now, or after another short -term financing extension, if nothing else seems to work.
Whatever the strategy that Democrats choose, they must understand that the fight in which they are different from any fight they have experienced in the past. It is not yet clear that all do it. So far, the Mantra of Democrats has been that Trump and Musk are trying to reduce Medicaid and other government programs to pay tax discounts for billionaires. It’s true, and it’s a powerful argument. But it is also the argument that Democrats still use against Republicans. This makes the crisis unprecedented in which we seem normal.
In fact, Trump, Musk and the ideologists around them are not mainly interested in reducing expenses (like their authoritarian Russia models in Hungary, they would probably be happy to see government checks of major social programs continue to flow). What interests them is power. They want to eliminate or reduce the size of each part of the government which is dominated by non -partisan officials who work for the people, rather than for a particular president. Their legislative program is to break the legislative power, to reduce the congress to the status of an advisory body. And if no one prevents them from entering legally appropriate funds, this is what the Congress will become.
The American people will pay a terrible price for the destruction of the talent and the capacity of our government and the shredding of our Constitution. Perhaps the pain we suffered will do more of us to vote for the Democrats in two years. But the country cannot afford to wait so long. The fight must be joined next week.
