World Politics News   Articles for World Politics Course

We are witnessing a very strange event in political history. Under the pretext of eliminating “waste, fraud, and abuse”, the Trump Administration is attempting to deconstruct most parts of the government, leaving the Executive Branch the sole repository of power in the US. The strategy is to completely erase any institutional support for the process of checks and balances that the Constitution requires to work properly.

The maneuver clearly intends to reduce the power of the Congress and the Courts. I suspect that the courts will try to preserve their power, but courts lack enforcement powers. Trump’s behavior in courts during 2020-24 suggests that he is more than willing to exploit that weakness through delay and manipulation of the legal process. If push comes to shove in the courts, it is only the Congress that can levy penalties to induce changed behavior.

Which raises an interesting question: why are Republican Congresspeople and Senators willing to give away their principal authority which is to allocate money to keep the government going? It is rare to witness the voluntary forfeiture of power. The immediate answer to this question is that these Republicans fear the power of Trump to oust them through primaries. But this begs the question. If the Federal government is eviscerated, then many of the constituents of these Congresspeople will suffer badly and are likely to take out their anger in an election. This outcome is highly probably if the cuts to the Federal government diminish the benefits of Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and other social programs. Why is the fear of Trump greater than the fear of angry voters?

I will put my money on the people if the cuts happen quickly, before Trump can defang Federal enforcement of the Constitution. There is a reason Trump went after USAID first–most Americans have little idea of what USAID does. But going after USAID will not fund the tax cuts that the President wants–it is a small amount of money relative to the overall budget.. The budget deal being contemplated by the Republican caucus must go through a process called reconciliation which has strict rules permitting a budget to pass with only 51 votes and not the 60 votes in a Senate with a filibuster rule. Once the American people feel the pain of what it means to lose the Federal government, they may have second thoughts about supporting Trump and those in the Congress who support him.

We will have to see. The budget must be submitted by 14 March and there are still large divisions within the Republican Party about how the budget should be structured. The deficit hawks in the House of Representatives will demand spending cuts that would require cuts in the most important programs affecting the well-being of Americans, such as Social Security and Medicaid. A month is not enough time to work out these fundamental disagreements since the main members of the Freedom Caucus live in gerrymandered districts and have little to fear from Trump’s threats of being primaried. We will see how this works out.