The Coming Constitutional Crisis

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

German Lopez at NYT:

In the United States, Congress, the president and the courts are supposed to keep an eye on one another — to stop any one branch of government from becoming too powerful. President Trump is showing us what happens when those checks and balances break down.

The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. “The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,” said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.

In doing so, Trump has called the bluff of our constitutional system: It works best when each branch does its job with alacrity. Trump’s opponents are filing lawsuits, but courts are slow and deliberative. They can’t keep up with the changes the White House has already implemented. Congress could fight back, but the Republican lawmakers in charge have shrugged, as my colleague Carl Hulse reported. Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina conceded that what the administration is doing “runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense.” But, he said, “nobody should bellyache about that.”

As a result, most of Trump’s actions stand unchecked.

Calder McHugh at Politico:

Since President Donald Trump took office, federal courts have been busy hitting the brakes on the most ambitious parts of his shock-and-awe agenda. Courts have temporarily blocked the administration’s ability to implement a federal funding freeze, its attempts to cull the federal workforce, the president’s order ending birthright citizenship and even a plan to move three incarcerated transgender women to men’s facilities.

What it tells us is that Trump’s second term seems likely to be defined by a different kind of conflict than his first. This time around, he understands the gears and levers of government better. He’s surrounded by loyalists in every agency. Congress has bent the knee and shows zero interest in serving as a check on the executive branch. Now, it’s the judiciary, which is fielding a deluge of legal challenges against the White House agenda, that’s barreling towards a confrontation with a president who already holds it in low regard.

The contours of the fight between the two branches of government — and exactly how a newly emboldened Trump plans to take on obstinate judges — are just now coming into focus.

After a district judge issued a temporary restraining order on the Trump administration’s ability to implement a blanket federal spending freeze on Monday, many EPA climate and infrastructure grants remain frozen as of today.

The Justice Department has acknowledged receipt of the judge’s order. But the Trump administration has not yet complied with portions of the order. Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), described the standoff this way: “It’s hard to tell what is incompetence and what is confusion and what is basically contemptuous trickery.”

The incident might be a one-off, an innocent oversight in the fog of assembling a new administration. But it might also be a preview of what’s to come. There are few enforcement mechanisms that the judiciary can rely on to make other branches of the federal government comply with their orders. If the Trump administration decides to willfully ignore orders from federal judges, it would, at minimum, present a constitutional crisis with no obvious solutions.

Walking Back the Walkback

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. After Trump proposed the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, his staff tried to walk his statement back.  He meant it.

Brazen

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Peter Baker at NYT:

Mr. Trump’s announcement that he intends to seize control of Gaza, displace the Palestinian population and turn the coastal enclave into “the Riviera of the Middle East” was the kind of thing he might have said to get a rise on “The Howard Stern Show” a decade or two ago. Provocative, intriguing, outlandish, outrageous — and not at all presidential.

But now in his sequel term in the White House, Mr. Trump is advancing ever-more brazen ideas about redrawing the map of the world in the tradition of 19th-century imperialism. First there was buying Greenland, then annexing Canada, reclaiming the Panama Canal and renaming the Gulf of Mexico. And now he envisions taking over a devastated war zone in the Middle East that no other American president would want.

Never mind that he could name no legal authority that would permit the United States to unilaterally assert control over someone else’s territory or that the forcible removal of an entire population would be a violation of international law. Never mind that resettling two million Palestinians would be a gargantuan logistical and financial challenge, not to mention politically explosive. Never mind that it would surely require many thousands of U.S. troops and possibly trigger more violent conflict.

Hannah Knowles, Colby Itkowitz and Liz Goodwin at WP:

President Donald Trump’s administration launched one of its most brazen challenges yet to Congress’s authority this week when officials led by billionaire Elon Musk gutted and threatened to abolish the U.S. Agency for International Development and suggested that other agencies should brace for overhauls.

But Republican lawmakers have raised few objections about the push to ax USAID, alarming Democrats who say the GOP is ceding power to the White House.

The Founding Fathers “set up a Congress. They set up debate,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) said Tuesday. “And the American people, mark my words, the American people will not stand for an unelected secret group to run rampant in the executive branch.”

Even as Democrats warned of a “constitutional crisis,” it was business as usual on Republican-controlled Capitol Hill on Tuesday, as two controversial Trump nominees, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, cleared Senate committee votes.

David E. Sanger and Julian E. Barnes:

The C.I.A. sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal work force, in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries.

The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking to identify them.

The agency normally would prefer not to put these names in an unclassified system. Some former officials said they worried that the list could be passed on to a team of newly hired young software experts working with Elon Musk and his government efficiency team. If that happened, the names of the employees might be more easily targeted by China, Russia or other foreign intelligence services.

One former agency officer called the reporting of the names in an unclassified email a “counterintelligence disaster.”

Trump Blinks, Xi Doesn't

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

CNN:

 

Beijing announced a broad package of economic measures targeting the United States on Tuesday, hitting back after US President Donald Trump imposed 10% tariffs on Chinese imports.

The fresh duties, announced by China’s Ministry of Finance, levy a 15% tax on certain types of coal and liquefied natural gas and a 10% tariff on crude oil, agricultural machinery, large-displacement cars and pickup trucks. The measures take effect on February 10.

The Ministry of Commerce and China’s customs administration also announced new export controls effective immediately on more than two dozen metal products and related technologies. Those include tungsten, a critical mineral typically used in industrial and defense applications, as well as tellurium, which can be used to make solar cells.

Trump paused tariffs against Canada and Mexico.  WSJ is unimpressed:

But there’s much less to this tariff truce than meets the eye. Mr. Trump won an announcement of help at the border, though what the Mexican troops will actually do to fight the cartels trafficking drugs isn’t clear. Drug enforcement is a hardy perennial in U.S.-Mexican relations, and Mexico has promised help before, notably during the presidencies of Felipe Calderón and Enrique Peña Nieto.

As for immigration, Ms. Sheinbaum has already essentially agreed to cooperate on restoring the Remain in Mexico policy for migrants who reach the Mexico-U.S. border. Illegal border crossings have also been falling fast as Mr. Trump has sent a signal that illegal migrants won’t be allowed to stay in the U.S.

Later Monday, Mr. Trump paused his tariffs against Canada as well after a phone call with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Canada is also deploying more law enforcement to the U.S. border and will appoint a “Fentanyl Czar,” among other enforcement promises.

If the North American leaders need to cheer about a minor deal so they all claim victory, that’s better for everyone. The need is especially important for Mr. Trump given how much he has boasted that his tariffs are a fool-proof diplomatic weapon against friend or foe. Mr. Trump can’t afford to look like the guy who lost. Ms. Sheinbaum in particular seems to recognize this, and so far she’s playing her Trump cards with skill.

Trump succeeds in getting Canada to appoint a Fentanyl Czar. As students of the War on Drugs will know, once you name a Czar to tackle illegal drugs, the black markets just disappear, as if by magic. The U.S. named our first drug Czar in 1930 and ever since we've had no illegal… https://t.co/2kG3b36LVo

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) February 4, 2025

Retaliation

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start. Trump's tariffs are taking effect -- with predictable results.

Mickey Djuric at POLITICO.

Canada’s retaliatory tariffs will target Republican states and Donald Trump allies.

“Canadians understand that we need to respond to this,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said Saturday night. “We need to respond in a way that is appropriate, that is measured but forceful, that meets the moment.”

There are 1,256 items in the first tranche of tariffs that will come into force on Tuesday.

The list includes oranges and fruit from Florida, home to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort; household appliances from South Carolina and Ohio, states to Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Vice President J.D. Vance; and motorcycles and coffee from southern Pennsylvania, which helped return Trump to the White House.

The full list, which you can read here, contains food and agriculture products, textiles and furniture.

Energy and tech products were not included in the first round of tariffs. A second list will be published in the coming days.

Government officials also said Ottawa is not ruling out other retaliatory measures such as targeting Elon Musk’s companies, or slapping export taxes on Canadian oil.

Tariff Time

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

There's no connection between tariffs and illegal drugs/immigration in real life.

The connection is that Trump's Day 1 emergency declarations on those two subjects unlock powers under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which he is using as a fig leaf to do tariffs.

— Dominic Pino (@DominicJPino) February 2, 2025

David Lawder at Reuters:

President Donald Trump has pushed into new trade law territory with an emergency sanctions law to justify punishing 25% tariffs on Canadian and Mexican imports and an extra 10% duty on Chinese goods to curb fentanyl and illegal immigration into the U.S.

Trade and legal experts said the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) is untested for imposing import tariffs and Trump's action will likely face swift court challenges that could set important precedents.

As widely expected, Trump declared a national emergency under IEEPA on Saturday, citing the "extraordinary threat" from fentanyl and illegal immigration. The law gives the president broad powers to impose economic and financial sanctions in times of crisis, including against Russia over its war in Ukraine.

IEEPA gave Trump, in his second week of his second term in the White House, the fastest path to imposing tariffs, as trade laws he used in his first four years for duties on steel, aluminum and Chinese goods would have required months-long investigations and public consultations.

If a president wanted to foment anti-Americanism among our Canadian neighbors, he could scarcely do better than this post: 

Trump's Week Two

Our forthcoming book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration is off to an ominous start.

Adam Goldman, Devlin Barrett, and Glenn Thrush at NYT:

The Trump administration plans to scrutinize thousands of F.B.I. agents involved in Jan. 6 investigations, setting the stage for a possible purge that goes far beyond the bureau’s leaders to target rank-and-file agents, according to internal documents and people familiar with the matter.

The proposal came on a day that more than a dozen prosecutors at the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington who had worked on cases involving the Jan. 6 riot were told that they were being terminated.

The moves were a powerful indication that Mr. Trump has few qualms deploying the colossal might of federal law enforcement to punish perceived political enemies, even as his cabinet nominees offered sober assurances they would abide by the rule of law. Forcing out both agents and prosecutors who worked on Jan. 6 cases would amount to a wide-scale assault on the Justice Department.

On Friday, interim leaders at the department instructed the F.B.I. to notify more than a half-dozen high-ranking career officials that they faced termination, according to a copy of an internal memo obtained by The New York Times

Gavin Bade et al. at WSJ:

The U.S. will impose tariffs on computer chips, pharmaceuticals, steel, aluminum, copper, oil and gas imports as soon as mid-February, President Trump said Friday, opening a new front in his looming second-term trade wars.

“That’ll happen fairly soon,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, adding that he also wants to hike tariffs on the European Union, which has “treated us so horribly,” though he didn’t specify when or how high the duties would be. A representative for the European Union didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

The announcement for those sector-based and EU tariffs appeared separate from the 25% tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and 10% tariffs on China, which he had said would be implemented Saturday.

The duties previewed by Trump would come on top of existing tariffs on those products, he said, waving away any concern about the levies increasing inflation or snarling global supply chains.

Zack Stanton at Politico Playbook:

Week one: Trump toured wildfire damage in California and visited burned-out homes. It was presidential.

Week two: Asked by reporters whether he would visit the collision site where 67 people died on the Potomac River, Trump responded: “What’s the site? The water? You want me to go swimming?”

Week one: Trump literally embraced California Gov. Gavin Newsom, his longtime political foe, and, as Christopher Cadelago and Melanie Mason wrote, “refrained from his sharp-edged digs and instead pledged to help lead in the recovery effort.”

Week two: Trump foisted blame for the DCA crash onto Presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg (“He’s just got a good line of bullshit,” Trump said at his presser) and DEI policies.

Put succinctly: “In the wake of this week’s midair collision near Washington, Mr. Trump was more than happy to jump to conclusions and pull the country apart rather than together,” NYT’s Peter Baker writes this morning.

A quick reality check: The initial FAA report says that air traffic control staffing responsibilities at Reagan were “not normal” and that one person was doing two jobs, NYT’s Sydney Ember and Emily Steel report. … ABC News notes there isn’t any affirmative action in the hiring of air traffic controllers. … The disability hiring policies that Trump criticized were actually maintained and used by his own first administration, WaPo’s Glenn Kessler writes. … The executive action Trump signed yesterday to unwind diversity programs at the Department of Transportation and the FAA came even though, as Bloomberg’s Akayla Gardner reports, there is “no evidence that diversity initiatives led to the crash, nor is there evidence that such practices result in poor operational outcomes.”

It wasn’t just his handling of the tragedy at DCA that marked the change. The other big story this week, Trump-wise, was the brouhaha over the now-blocked federal spending freeze. It lacked White House vetting. It galvanized Democratic opposition. It caused the Trump administration to walk it back — and then walk back the walkback. It amounts to a quick shift for the White House “from inaugural euphoria to the realities of governing,” WSJ’s Natalie Andrews and Meridith McGraw write this morning