Trump's Imperial Presidency? - Henninger, WSJ
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With Mr. Trump, however, we may be heading to the outer limits of what America’s traditional system of checks and balances can absorb. Among Mr. Trump’s first acts was to instruct his Justice Department not to enforce a ban on TikTok imposed by an act of Congress and affirmed unanimously by the Supreme Court. In his inaugural speech, Mr. Trump never mentioned Congress, exhibiting a disdain for the legislative branch also shared by his White House predecessors.
A remarkable deference to Mr. Trump’s use of his powers is happening, or being allowed to happen, because so many Americans think the political system is broken, a point he hit hard in his inaugural speech: “For many years, the radical and corrupt establishment has extracted power and wealth from our citizens. While the pillars of our society lay broken and seemingly in complete disrepair, we now have a government that cannot manage even a simple crisis at home.” In a blink, Mr. Trump went from zero to 60 on exercising presidential authority, declaring two national emergencies—on the border and energy policy. If energy is a crisis under the National Emergencies Act, anything is.
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The term “imperial presidency” was coined in the 1970s by the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. In practice, Democrats have invoked the threat of an imperial presidency as a cudgel against Republican presidents. It started with Richard Nixon and the political crisis over the Watergate break-in and Nixon’s impoundments of congressional spending. I’d argue you can draw a line from what happened to Nixon to the public’s elevation of Donald Trump, who is certain to be accused of conducting an imperial presidency. He will love it.
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House reformers also created a labyrinthine system of new subcommittees with overlapping jurisdictions. The House speaker became more a traffic cop than a setter of priorities. The gerrymandering of House districts proliferated, ensuring political polarization. The result of these flawed congressional decisions today is a household word: gridlock. Like it or not, Washington still has to function, and the void left by Congress’s decline as a coequal branch was filled by the administrative state down the street on Constitution Avenue. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is supposed to fix that. He may plant a flag on Mars first.
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The breadth of the Trump presidential orders is impressive but also a sign of a system that isn’t working as originally designed. Congress is supposed to represent the country’s varied interests, down to 435 separate congressional districts. And they are different. Mr. Trump is displacing that federalism of interests with the simpler idea of a uniform national interest, defined and executed by the president.
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We are about to enter another age of strong, if not imperial, presidential authority. And perhaps some of it is necessary, with no end in sight to Congress’s underperformance. But Mr. Trump’s instinct, evident this first week, is to be unbound by much of anything. Conservatives, not least his own people, will need to hold the 47th president to account.
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/trumps-imperial-presidency-we-may-be-headed-to-outer-limits-american-system-checks-and-balances-ef6e6c99?st=3aqTSg&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink
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