Time to Show Some Backbone

Donald Trump really, really doesn’t like that the government of Ontario is playing clips of Ronald Reagan extolling free markets and disparaging tariffs on U.S. TV:

“CANADA CHEATED AND GOT CAUGHT!!!” he wrote on Truth Social this morning, apparently under the mistaken belief that the Reagan quotes had been fabricated. “They fraudulently took a big buy ad saying that Ronald Reagan did not like Tariffs, when actually he LOVED TARIFFS FOR OUR COUNTRY, AND ITS NATIONAL SECURITY. Canada is trying to illegally influence the United States Supreme Court in one of the most important rulings in the history of our Country.”

You’ve got to feel for him. What’s the point of being the most powerful man in the world if they can still put stuff you don’t like on TV? Happy Friday.

An Ounce of Courage in the Desert

by Andrew Egger

Here’s something unusual we spotted this week: faint stirrings of independent thought from Republican lawmakers in the Senate and around the country.

There’s the blue slips, for one thing. Donald Trump has chafed for months over a longstanding Senate precedent that gives senators a de facto veto over U.S. attorney and district court nominees in their home states.¹ But although he used Tuesday’s lunch in the Rose Garden to berate his GOP Senate allies for honoring the blue-slip tradition, they are standing firm. At a Judiciary Committee meeting Wednesday, Republicans praised chairman Chuck Grassley for sticking with the practice: “I want to thank you for our courage,” Sen. John Kennedy said, “with respect to Democrat and Republican presidents, for standing your ground on the blue slip, which I support unconditionally.”

Meanwhile, farm-state senators took the opportunity of the Rose Garden lunch to push back hard against Trump’s idea of importing more Argentinian beef, pestering Trump himself and a number of his cabinet officials on the subject.

It was Senate opposition, too, that led to the collapse of Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel this week after Politico reported on his racist group-chat text messages. It wasn’t until after a number of Republican senators flatly said Ingrassia wouldn’t pass that the White House pulled his nomination.

These small displays of courage are all to the good. But they are minor displays indeed—at a moment when Trump is making perhaps his most egregious attempt yet to claim powers that constitutionally belong to Congress alone.

As the government shutdown drags on, more and more ordinary recipients of government funds have had to go without. Various cash-assistance programs are starting to dry up, and many federal workers are furloughed or on the job without pay.

But there’s one group Trump is determined to keep paying: military service members. Earlier this month, the president instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to start cannibalizing various other parts of the Pentagon budget to keep paychecks rolling to the troops. “I will not allow the Democrats to hold our Military, and the entire Security of our Nation, HOSTAGE, with their dangerous government shutdown,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. Hegseth complied: the Department announced it had rustled up $8 billion to send out paychecks this month.

Then, yesterday, Trump made a further announcement. An anonymous billionaire friend of his, he said, had cut a $130 million check to the federal government to keep the troops paid further. “I’d like to contribute, personally contribute, any shortfall you have with the military,” Trump quoted the unnamed benefactor as saying. “I love the military, and I love the country.”

It’s a terrible thing that troops should have to go without pay because Congress can’t find a way to fund the government. (See Mark Hertling for more on this over on the homepage.) But when Congress isn’t funding the government, the government isn’t funded—full stop. The legislature’s power of the purse isn’t just a managerial role bestowed on it by the president, to be reclaimed by him any time he deems lawmakers to be falling down on the job. The Constitution leaves no wiggle room: The executive branch spends money when the laws of the country tell it to do so, and nobody writes those laws but Congress.

This is far from the first moment Trump has tried to chip away at Congress’s spending authority—he’s repeatedly claimed the authority to refuse to spend money appropriated for various purposes via so-called rescissions. But even those infringements are less alarming than this naked attempt to say money should keep flowing from the Treasury despite no law authorizing it, based purely on his personal say-so.

We shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that Trump is claiming the personal authority to keep money flowing to the troops—either from Pentagon funds intended for other purposes or from his wealthy pals—while he continues to treat the U.S. military like a private army unbound by laws beyond his will. He sends them into blue cities, he uses them to blow up what he claims are drug-running boats in international waters—and now he pays them, he says, on his own authority. This is more than an affront to the Constitution—it’s a dangerous argument that the troops work not for us but for him.

Republicans in Congress have shown they can grow a bit of a backbone on blue slips and Argentinian beef. Is it so insane to hope they could also protest against the president overriding their constitutional authority and treating the U.S. armed forces as private mercenaries?