Will the Other Two Branches Dare to Push Back Against Trump? - Seib, WSJ
The noise coming out of the White House right now is loud—earsplitting, really. President Trump announces sweeping tariffs one day and then calls them off two days later, entirely on his own. He orders agencies to stop spending congressionally appropriated funds. He declares that the U.S. will take over Gaza. His unelected and unvetted friend Elon Musk swoops into government agencies to decide whether he deems their programs efficient or not, and shuts down one agency entirely.
Amid the clamor, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that what the country is witnessing is a classic Trumpian process: The president is testing the system to find the outer limits of his powers. It’s unlikely he thinks he can get away with everything he is trying, but he also knows that one way to find out is to try. It is a strategy that he has deployed repeatedly in his business career, in his presidential campaigns and in his first term as president.
Now this approach is unfolding again, but on a grander scale than ever before. As it does, only two factors really matter in determining its outcome: At what point will Congress stand up for itself? And when and where will the nation’s courts draw the line on the aggressive use of presidential power? For Trump, discovering the answers to these questions may be less a feature of the exercise than its whole point.
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From its founding, the American republic has struggled to decide how powerful it wants its chief executive to be. Wary of allowing too much power to reside with any one person or institution, the Constitution’s authors consciously split power among three branches of government—legislative, executive and judicial-—and structured each so as to limit the power of the other two. Lest anyone miss the point, James Madison devoted perhaps the best-known Federalist Paper, number 51, entirely to explaining the need for the separation of powers. The Constitution’s “constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other,” he wrote.
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Now, though, many conservatives contend that federal agencies and the Congress that authorized them have assumed too much authority. They espouse what is known as “unitary executive theory.” It holds that a president should have virtually unlimited control over federal agencies and personnel, regardless of how much independence Congress may attempt to give them. With such an approach in mind, the Heritage Foundation, a venerable conservative think tank, compiled a sweeping plan of presidential action, Project 2025, that is the blueprint for much of what the White House is now trying to do.
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