Trump Plans To Bypass Congress And Starve ‘The Deep State’

By Philip Wegmann for RealClearWire

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.

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.

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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.

Trump’s OMB disputed the GAO ruling at the time, saying the administration was simply its apportionment authority to spend the money according to the most efficient timetable.

“The reason why there wasn’t an impoundment was because we did not have the authority just to pocket the money and not spend it,” Vought recalled, saying that if a new paradigm was in place, the administration “potentially would have had the ability to go further and pocket the money.”

Trump believes impoundment would be “a crucial tool” in his fight with the administrative state. “Bringing back impoundment will give us a crucial tool with which to obliterate the Deep State, Drain the Swamp, and starve the Warmongers,” he said in campaign video first obtained and reported by Semafor. “We can simply choke off the money.”

His campaign pointed RCP to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency within the Department of Homeland Security, an entity that House Republicans allege has been involved in censorship of Americans, as a prime example of where dollars could be impounded.

But even some conservatives have their doubts. Kevin Kosar, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, said that when it comes to cutting spending appropriated money after the fact, there “is a limited amount of wiggle room.”

“The idea that a president is going to achieve any sort of significant savings or reduction in the size of the administrative state by exercising impoundment authorities is patently ludicrous,” Kosar told RCP.

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The policy wonk agrees that the reform Nixon signed into law, mandating a complex and cumbersome budgeting process, seldom works. But without repealing and replacing that law, he said, “a president flat out refusing to spend money that was clearly appropriated for a particular purpose, saying he just doesn’t want to do it, pretty much would be grounds for impeachment.”

Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce during the Clinton administration, agrees that the current budget process “has become so dysfunctional that it is very ripe for reforms.”

Now a lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, she points to the partisan gridlock and numerous government shutdowns that are a feature of the current process. “The number of shutdowns in the entirety of U.S. history before 1974,” Bilmes said in an interview with RCP, “was zero.”

Congress has been kicking around ideas for some time on how to reform the way they spend taxpayer money. Lawmakers consistently fail to pass individual appropriation bills, opting instead to approve spending all at once with a single bill, usually at the end of year and the last minute.

Even if the process is reformed, however, Bilmes said that “the basic premise of the law, which is that the Constitution provides Congress with the ultimate authority, is very unlikely to change.”

She added that although she disagrees with the idea that reducing the national debt requires gutting the Impoundment Act, there is a recent precedent for taming runaway spending. Bilmes pointed RCP to the agreements hammered out between Bill Clinton and then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in the 1990s. That is possible again. In theory.

Syndicated with permission from RealClearWire.

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Rubio Rips Impeachment – Says Trump Can Be Criminally Prosecuted As Private Citizen Instead

Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) went on Fox News on Tuesday to say that he is against holding an impeachment trial against Donald Trump because the former president is now a private citizen, and can therefore be prosecuted in the criminal justice system.

Rubio Discusses Impeachment 

Fox News host Neil Cavuto posed the question, “Do you think he provoked that crowd when he said, ‘These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots.’ Do you think he should be punished for those remarks?”

“Yeah, so if someone makes those remarks, he’s a private citizen,” Rubio replied. “So he’s now — the reason why we have impeachment is the following; you can’t charge a president.”

“So you have to remove them from office and then subject to criminal penalty,” he added. “That’s why Ford Pardoned Nixon because after he resigned, he could have still been prosecuted.”

“If he did something that rises to that level and that these folks so strongly believe, then the criminal justice system and the civil system is in place to pursue,” Rubio continued. 

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Rubio Places Some Blame On Trump For Capitol Riots

Cavuto responded by questioning if Trump’s comments were “incendiary enough.”

“I think there’s no doubt that the president bears some responsibility for what happened,” Rubio responded. “If he’s president of the United States, you can’t charge him criminally. You have to impeach him and remove them and then charge him criminally.”

“In this case, he’s a private citizen,” he added. “If he committed wrongdoing while he was president, the criminal justice system can deal with that. This is not the right use of Congress’ time. It’s vindictive. It’s about revenge.”

Related: Marco Rubio Says It’s Time For ‘Honest Reflection’ Among Conservatives Following Capitol Riots

Rubio Says Impeaching Trump Would Be ‘Arrogant’

This came two days after Rubio said that it would be “arrogant” to impeach Trump just so that he can’t vote in the future.

“I think that’s an arrogant statement for anyone to make,” he said, according to Politico. “Voters get to decide that. Who are we to tell voters who they can vote for in the future?”

He added that the impeachment trial is “counterproductive” and will “continue to fuel these divisions that have paralyzed the country.”

“The first chance I get to vote to end this trial, I will do it, because I think it’s really bad for America,” he said.

Rubio followed through on Tuesday night by joining 44 other Republicans in voting against the impeachment trial, arguing that it is unconstitutional.

This piece was written by James Samson on January 27, 2021. It originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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Boston Poll Puts Sanders on Top in New Hampshire

By David Kamioner | January 23, 2020

Bernie Sanders is on a roll.

No, not a kaiser roll.

His political timing is hitting apogee at just the right time for the nation’s first Dem primary (Iowa is a caucus), as a Boston-based WBUR poll Thursday puts him at 29% in New Hampshire. That’s a strong lead over Buttigieg at 17%, Biden at 14%, and Warren at 13%. Everybody else is in single digits.

The poll was conducted by talking to 426 likely voters in the Granite State. The contest is in three weeks.

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But Sanders is off the campaign trail until the impeachment trial of the president is over.

Will his lead hold until then?

However, he’s top dog now and is also having a great fundraising cycle. The recent kerfuffle with neighboring Massachusetts’s own Dem Senator Elizabeth Warren only seems to have helped as, incredibly, most appear to believe he never said it. Thus Warren, not him, has taken the hit even with women.

The guy is on a lucky streak.

In a stinging indictment of the American education system, Sanders is killing it with Dem voters under 30. The socialist is taking an absolute majority of 52% of these sad ignorant toddlers. On the other hand, Biden leads with voters over 60.

They vote.

One interesting thing about this poll. A full third of male Dem NH voters approve of the way President Trump has dealt with the economy.

If that were to hold for November and even half of those voters swing to the GOP, Trump would win there handily. He narrowly lost to Clinton in the state in 2016.

Yet another reason to applaud toxic masculinity. But Sanders’ good fortunes make life easier for Trump as well.

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Regardless of the conformist bleatings of the kiddie set, who vote in low numbers anyway, a socialist with a pro-communist past is likely too far left for America and the president would romp to a reelection victory much like Nixon in 1972 or Reagan in 1984.

Dem pros know this, as does Hillary Clinton, and want to forestall that fate not only for electoral credibility but to prevent a crashed and burned Dem party from being bought at fire-sale political prices by the Obamas.

The duo would move in on the prostrate remains of the party like ravenous vultures at a rodent buffet in preparation for Michelle’s very probable statewide run in Illinois and then her eventual run for the White House.

This piece originally appeared in LifeZette and is used by permission.

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President Trump Wins His First Impeachment Trial Victory as Senate Votes 53 to 47
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