White House correspondent Andrew Egger tells the Bulwark that he spied something unfamiliar in Washington DC.
“Here’s something unusual we spotted this week: faint stirrings of independent thought from Republican lawmakers in the Senate and around the country,” said Egger, a former reporter with the Weekly Standard. “There’s the blue slips, for one thing. Donald Trump has chafed for months over a longstanding Senate precedent that gives senators a de factoveto over U.S. attorney and district court nominees in their home states.”
Egger points out that some senators are standing firm on the blue slip issue despite Trump using a recent lunch in the Rose Garden to berate Republicans for honoring the tradition. At a Wednesday Judiciary Committee meeting, Republicans even praised chairman Chuck Grassley for standing up for the practice, with Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) thanking him for his “courage.”
Egger notes farm-state senators also used the Rose Garden lunch to push back against Trump’s proposal to import more Argentinian beef to the detriment of U.S. farmers. And Senate opposition sank Paul Ingrassia’s nomination to lead the Office of Special Counsel this week after Politico reported on Ingrassia’s abhorrent and racist group-chat text messages.
But these are only faint stirrings, said Egger.
“As the government shutdown drags on, more and more ordinary recipients of government funds have had to go without … Trump instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to start cannibalizing various other parts of the Pentagon budget to keep paychecks rolling to the troops,” Egger reported, with the Department pulling together $8 billion to send out paychecks this month.
But then Trump announced an anonymous billionaire friend of his had cut a $130 million check to the federal government to keep the troops paid
“The Constitution leaves no wiggle room,” Egger warned. “The executive branch spends money when the laws of the country tell it to do so, and nobody writes those laws but Congress.”
Egger said Republicans have already stood by as Trump tried to chip away at Congress’s spending authority by refusing to spend Congressionally-appropriated money via so-called rescissions, but that infringement is “less alarming” than Trump’s “naked attempt to say money should keep flowing from the Treasury despite no law authorizing it, based purely on his personal say-so.”
“… 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,” Egger said. “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.
“Republicans in Congress have shown they can grow a bit of a backbone on blue slips and Argentinian beef,” Egger said. “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?
Read the Bulwark column at this link.