Trump Set For Victory Lap In Congress Even As He Usurps Its Power

“The principle of checks and balances only works if people don't voluntarily remove their spine,” one lawmaker said ahead of the president's speech.

WASHINGTON – The first month of President Donald Trump’s second term in the White House has been a nonstop assault on the authority of Congress as an equal branch of government, with the president asserting unprecedented control over lawmakers’ power to control spending.

While Democrats have cried foul, filing numerous lawsuits that are slowly making their way through the courts, Republicans have by and large cheered his efforts to accomplish what they’ve long failed to do through legislative means: eliminate large swaths of the federal government. On Tuesday, they’ll stand and clap for him some more when he addresses a joint session of Congress for the first time as the 47th president of the United States.

“President Trump is coming in a triumphant return to Congress to address us as the president once again, and in the first month of office, he has accomplished so much that it could fill three hours,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) gushed on Fox News on Sunday.

Trump has empowered Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, to rip through federal agencies in search of “waste, fraud and abuse,” resulting in mass firings of federal workers and the wholesale dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development, even though Musk and his underlings have uncovered almost zero waste, fraud or abuse. Their actions have led to widespread chaos and confusion across the government, with some critical employees later having to be rehired, and billions of dollars in foreign assistance put on hold or canceled.

The implosion of USAID, in particular, has been swift despite no congressional action on the matter. As the Congressional Research Service has explained, because it was created by Congress, “the President does not have the authority to abolish it; congressional authorization would be required to abolish, move, or consolidate USAID.”