by Philip Wegmann, Real Clear Wire:
Sources close to former President Trump say he has a plan for keeping Congress from ever again forcing him into “disgraceful” and “ridiculous” spending situations. If he returns to the White House, Trump will seek to resurrect authority that Congress stripped from the presidency almost a half century ago.
What President Nixon squandered, his campaign promises, Trump will restore, namely the impoundment power. “A lot of you,” the former president told a New Hampshire crowd Thursday, “don’t know what that is.” Indeed, few now remember it.
TRUTH LIVES on at https://sgtreport.tv/
Impoundment, if restored, would allow a president, in theory, to simply refuse to spend appropriations by Congress. More than just an avenue to cut spending, Trump sees that kind of authority as key to starving, and thus crushing, the so-called “deep state.”
But such a move would fundamentally alter the balance of power, and any effort to restore the long-forgotten authority virtually guarantees a protracted legal battle over who exactly controls the power of the purse. Trump welcomes that fight. Some budget experts believe he won’t get anywhere.
Regardless, advisors close to the former president tell RealClearPolitics they are drawing up plans to challenge the 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act in court, and if that fails, to lean on the legislature to repeal it. The latter would require passing a law to surrender power, something lawmakers are loath to do.
Congress already went to war with another president who had expansive views of his own authority. And Congress won.
Inflation in the 1970s, the Nixon White House complained, was the result of a profligate “Credit Card Congress.” The California Republican warned Capitol Hill not to spend in excess of $250 billion. When his warning was ignored, Nixon simply refused to spend the appropriated money. A rebuke from the Supreme Court followed when the president impounded funding for environmental projects. But weakened by Watergate, Nixon eventually signed legislation effectively surrendering a power that had been exercised from the presidencies of Thomas Jefferson to Lyndon B. Johnson.
Russ Vought, Trump’s last director of the Office of Management and Budget, calls the concession of impoundment power “the original sin” that ensured “the executive branch no longer plays a meaningful role” in the appropriations process. Vought told RCP in an interview that the power of the purse has become “caricature,” where rather than “setting ceilings,” Congress now sets “spending floors.”
Hence, Trump’s “unhappy” signature on multiple multi trillion-dollar spending bills.
Trump promised he would “never sign another bill like this again” before putting his signature on a “crazy” $1.3 trillion spending bill in 2018. Two years later, he signed another omnibus bill, this one worth $1.4 trillion, that he called “disgraceful.” Both times, Trump justified voting for the bloated bills conservatives loathed by pointing to increased military spending.
Restoring impoundment authority, thus giving presidents an option to curb spending beyond just the veto, current Trump campaign and former Trump administration officials tell RCP that was part of the plan for a second term that never came.
The former president said he believes the 1974 law that gutted impoundment is unconstitutional, and if returned to the White House, would govern accordingly.
“Yes, there’s the effort to have it overturned in courts. Yes, there is the legislative effort, but when you think that a law is unconstitutional,” Vought told RCP, the administration ought to look “to do the bare minimum of what the courts have required,” and “to push the envelope.”
Trump did something like this, exercising what Vought called “impoundment-like authorities,” when he froze nearly $400 million in foreign aid to Ukraine, even though the funds were congressionally appropriated. The Government Accountability Office later said that in doing so, Trump violated the law. He was impeached by the House over a phone call to Ukrainian President Zelensky concerning the money.
