Maddow Blog | As Trump tries to pry power away from Congress, will Republicans go along?

Exactly eight years ago this week, then-House Speaker Paul Ryan appeared on “60 Minutes” and talked to CBS News’ Scott Pelley about his expectations for Donald Trump’s incoming administration. At the time, the Wisconsin Republican said he’d spoken to the then-president-elect “extensively” about constitutional limits and the separation of powers, and he was optimistic about the road ahead.

Ryan assured viewers that Trump felt “very strongly, actually, that under President Obama’s watch, he stripped a lot of power away from the Constitution, away from the legislative branch of government. And we want to reset the balance of power.”

Pelley, somewhat surprised, asked, “You don’t think [Trump] thinks he’s going to run this country the way he wants to?” Ryan responded, “No, I think he understands there’s a Constitution.”

Eight years later, it’s hard to know whether to laugh or cry. Trump might very well have wanted to “reset the balance of power,” but despite the then-speaker’s confidence, it certainly wasn’t in Congress’ favor.

As the president-elect eyes a second term, Ryan’s assurances from 2016 appear even more absurd. The New York Times reported over the holiday weekend:

President-elect Donald J. Trump’s determination to crash over traditional governmental guardrails will present a fundamental test of whether the Republican-controlled Senate can maintain its constitutional role as an independent institution and a check on presidential power. With Mr. Trump putting forward a raft of contentious prospective nominees and threatening to challenge congressional authority in other ways, Republicans who will hold the majority come January could find themselves in the precarious position of having to choose between standing up for their institution or bowing to a president dismissive of government norms.

The Times’ analysis added that Trump’s ambitions risk doing “permanent damage to the Senate” and undermining the nation’s “constitutional system.”

To be sure, the Republican spent much of the year running on an authoritarian-style platform. As regular readers know, Trump threatened perceived foes with prison sentences, endorsed a “strongman” leadership style, bragged about his support from dictators, raised the prospect of a temporary American “dictatorship,” promised a crackdown on the free press, and talked about “terminating” parts of the Constitution that stand in the way of his ambitions.

Trump also argued that his rivals shouldn’t be “allowed” to run against him, targeted immigrants with Hitler-style rhetoric while promising to create militarized mass deportations and detention camps, vowed to issue pardons to politically aligned criminals, and insisted that those who criticize judges and Supreme Court justices that he likes “should be put in jail.”

And did I mention that he has raised the specter of military tribunals for his perceived domestic political foes? Because he did that, too.

But as part of the 2024 campaign, Trump did not go out of his way to emphasize his plans to consolidate federal power in the executive, shifting authority away from the legislative branch. Now that Election Day has come and gone, however, this has become a central element of his vision for the near future.

The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus recently published an important summary on this, highlighting the degree to which the president-elect is setting the stage for an “alarming takeover,” focused on “a vast, dangerous and unconstitutional expansion of presidential power.”

This agenda, Marcus added, “includes not just emasculating the Senate’s advice-and-consent role but also refusing to spend money that lawmakers have appropriated, curbing the independence of federal regulatory agencies and eviscerating the nonpartisan civil service.”

The same day, The New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie explained, “In our system, the executive branch cannot exercise the full power of the legislature. It cannot act as a monarch would. The sovereign people did not imbue their power into a leviathan. The upshot of this is that any interpretation of the Constitution that grants the president monarchical power is wrong. The structure of the Constitution precludes a royal prerogative, and the ethos of American democracy forbids it.”

It’s a vision that Trump appears eager to discard, rejecting the very idea of the separation of powers, and taking steps to seize additional governmental authority for himself.

The question then becomes what GOP members of Congress — ostensibly a co-equal branch of government — intend to do about it.

We’ll learn soon enough how federal lawmakers respond to a chief executive trying to consolidate power in the Oval Office, but the early evidence is hardly encouraging. Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama, for example, recently told Fox News that Trump and Vice President-elect JD Vance will soon be “running the Senate.”

The Alabaman added that, as far as he’s concerned, it’s not up to senators to “determine” whether Trump’s cabinet nominees have merit.

Of course, in reality, Tuberville was overlooking one of the Senate’s most important responsibilities, pretending that the Constitution’s advise-and-consent role doesn’t exist.

Around the same time, Republican Rep. Troy Nehls of Texas added, in reference to the president-elect, “He’s got a mission statement, his mission and his goals and objectives, whatever that is, we need to embrace it, all of it, every single word. … If Donald Trump says, ‘Jump three feet high and scratch your head,’ we all jump three feet high and scratch your heads. That’s it.”

The preservation of our constitutional system will require elected lawmakers standing up for their own power. Given the increasingly pitiful state of congressional Republicans, it’s difficult to be optimistic.

This article was originally published on MSNBC.com

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