| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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unidentified
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I'm a doctoral student at the University of Delaware, and I really think the president should be talking about youth homelessness in his upcoming congressional briefing. | |
| Hey, my name is Thomas. | ||
| I'm from Brazil, and I would like the President to talk about the environment, because I think it's one of the greatest challenges of the century, and it impacts my home country. | ||
| My name is Audrey. | ||
| I'm from Philadelphia, and I hope the President addresses science funding. | ||
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| Welcome back. | ||
| We're joined now by Philip Wallach. | ||
| He's a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the book called Why Congress. | ||
| Phil, welcome to the program. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Great to be with you. | |
| So just start by telling us about your background and your areas of expertise. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure, I'm a political scientist who studies American politics and especially our constitutional system, our policymaking system, and the separation of powers, how our branches fit together. | |
| And over the last seven or eight years, I've mostly focused on studying Congress because I really am concerned that Congress is in some ways the part of our government that's having the most trouble. | ||
| And because Congress has troubles, we get a lot of problems passing laws that are legitimate, that the whole American people accept that will be binding. | ||
| And we end up putting so much stress on our presidential elections that it really strains our political system. | ||
| So you're a senior fellow at AEI. | ||
| Does that mean you have a conservative point of view? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I think of myself as a center-right person, but I'm especially, I'm a little unusually concerned about process and sort of the way we do things and not just a particular set of priorities. | |
| So let's talk about the speech tonight that the president will be giving. | ||
| What are you looking for in terms of how President Trump defines his role and his powers? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, I think President Trump in this second term has been very clear that he thinks he won a huge victory, a mandate from the American people, and that gives him, pretty much entitles him to do whatever he thinks is right. | |
| And of course, the president takes an oath to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, right? | ||
| And sometimes President Trump seems to think that when he finds laws inconvenient or bad, they don't apply. | ||
| And so I wonder if he'll say anything on that score to reassure those of us who are worried that they're playing a little fast and loose with the law in this new administration. | ||
| But, you know, I expect President Trump to revert to form as a showman, right? | ||
| He will tout his accomplishments. | ||
| He will say, this is the, we've seen more good things happen in the last six weeks than ever before in American history. | ||
| There was a posting on X, I believe, where President Trump wrote, quote, he who saves his country does not violate any law. | ||
| That is quoted. | ||
| It's attributed to Napoleon, who crowned himself Emperor-Emperor. | ||
| What was your reaction when you saw that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Gosh, I mean, Trump is the master troll, right? | |
| He knows how to provoke reactions and he can always say, oh, I was just kidding around. | ||
| I was just trying to get a rise out of my opponents. | ||
| But it's crazy for the President of the United States, we a constitutional republic, to be favorably citing this Napoleon Bonaparte, who made himself emperor, who ended the republic in France and converted it into an empire and went trying to conquer the whole of Europe. | ||
| That's a crazy thing for a President of the United States to be favorably quoting on his social media. | ||
| So, you know, I do consider myself successfully trolled. | ||
| It did get a rise out of me. | ||
| That's not what kind of country America is supposed to be. | ||
| We are a country where we have the rule of law. | ||
| The law is king in America. | ||
| There is no other king. | ||
| We don't elect a king. | ||
| A president is bound to be an officer of the law. | ||
| Tell us about unitary executive theory. | ||
| What does that mean and where did it come from? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So there's a question about how the executive branch ought to be organized. | ||
| We obviously have literally millions of people who are employed in the executive branch of our government today. | ||
| That's quite a contrast from the beginnings of our country when there were just a few hundred in 1789. | ||
| So the question is, how much do we need to have it be so that the president as the boss at the top of this pyramid sort of is literally responsible for everything that happens in the executive branch and has the ability to hire and fire as he sees fit? | ||
| The unitary executive theory says, yes, the Constitution makes the president the sole head of the executive branch, and there really isn't room for independence within the executive branch. | ||
| So independent agencies, which we've had for many, many decades, are suspicious. | ||
| We think, why are they independent? | ||
| Why don't they answer to the democratically elected president? | ||
| So President Trump and his supporters have leaned very hard into the unitary executive theory to justify why the president needs to be sort of having direct control over every part of the government. | ||
| They've maybe taken it even farther in sort of suggesting anything the president says goes, which the unitary executive theory doesn't necessarily need to say. | ||
| Philip Wallach is our guest. | ||
| He's the author of the book called Why Congress. | ||
| He's also a senior fellow at the AEI. | ||
| If you'd like to join our conversation, you can do so. | ||
| Start calling in now. | ||
| Democrats are on 202748-8000. | ||
| Republicans 202-748-8001. | ||
| And Independents 202-748-8002. | ||
| So where does that theory leave Congress? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, so the executive branch is one thing, and Congress is another thing, right? | |
| Congress is the Article I branch of government. | ||
| It doesn't get its power from the President. | ||
| It gets its power from the people who elect our representatives and senators. | ||
| So Congress is meant to be the preeminent branch of our government that makes the big decisions. | ||
| They're the ones who make the law, and the president is supposed to be executing the law. | ||
| So that really ought to give Congress pride of place. | ||
| But it's clear that Congress in recent years has often sort of marginalized itself. | ||
| Members of Congress, you'll see them sort of begging the president to do things. | ||
| Well, you could trust make a law, but instead you're going around the lawmaking process and saying the president is the one who somehow is supposed to make all the policies, make all the decisions. | ||
| And so as a member of Congress, the most effective thing I can do is bend the president's ear. | ||
| That's really a dangerous shift for Congress that suggests that it's a subordinate branch. | ||
| Do you think that the power of the executive had already been expanding past even before our current time? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, I think it's a long upward trajectory. | |
| Not always steady, right? | ||
| After Watergate, Congress seized back a lot of powers. | ||
| So there have been times when Congress has shown that it can stand up for itself. | ||
| But in the 21st century, especially, we've seen some very assertive presidents. | ||
| You know, you had Barack Obama say, well, when Congress isn't doing what I want, I have my pen and my phone, and I can do an awful lot of policymaking just with those by ordering people to do things in the executive. | ||
| So Trump has fit into this upward trajectory, but I think it's fair to say that the second Trump administration is making the most aggressive claims of really any administration we've ever seen. | ||
| You published a commentary with the title, The Rule of Law Has Seen Better Days. | ||
| Explain what you mean by that and if you think that there are laws being broken right now. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think it's clear that there are. | |
| You know, some of them are kind of detailed, not likely to be things that the ordinary American is experiencing directly. | ||
| So there's a question about the funding of research labs. | ||
| And Congress very clearly set out a formula that it wanted and said it had a disagreement with the first Trump administration. | ||
| And so it very clearly put this into law. | ||
| The second Trump administration says, well, sorry, we're giving less for overhead. | ||
| It doesn't matter that the law says otherwise. | ||
| So there's little things like that. | ||
| That is an important policy, but something most people won't notice. | ||
| Then there's just the question of the civil service laws and how the federal employment is structured and what kind of procedures you have to go through to shut down an agency, right? | ||
| The USAID is established by law. | ||
| The president has made it sound like, nevertheless, he can just disappear it because it's wrong. | ||
| I guess under unitary executive theory, that whole branch belongs to him. | ||
| So he could shut down an agency if he chose to. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, again, the president is charged with taking care that the laws are faithfully executed, and those are good laws on the books. | |
| So the president has to have sort of direct lines of control through the executive branch under unitary executive theory. | ||
| But traditionally, they don't have the power to just disregard the law. | ||
| Now, another place where this is going to come up is this question of impoundment, right? | ||
| This spending. | ||
| When Congress passes spending laws, is the president required to spend up to the amount that Congress has said? | ||
| Or does the president have an inherent power to say, actually, I don't want to spend as much on this. | ||
| That's just a ceiling for how much I could spend. | ||
| So President Nixon made some very aggressive claims about how he could simply impound funds if he thought the policy was bad. | ||
| President Trump seems to be moving in that direction, although he hasn't formally made any claim of that yet. | ||
| And I'll just put up what impoundment, the Empoundment Control Act of 1974 requires the President to spend appropriated money unless he obtains congressional approval within 45 days not to disperse the funds. | ||
| And has that ever happened? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Many presidents since the passage of that 1974 Act have successfully gotten rescissions, they're called. | ||
| So we rescind the spending that originally was in the appropriations laws. | ||
| It does require going to Congress and working with members of Congress to pass those bills. | ||
| And certainly easier for the president to just say, I can do this all on my own. | ||
| But certainly since the big clashes with Nixon in the 70s, no president has really gone outside of that framework to say, I have a strong impoundment power. | ||
| President Trump looks like he may. | ||
| Let's talk to callers, and we'll start with Mary on the Republican line in Smithville, Texas. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hello? | |
| Yeah, go ahead, Mary. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, my name is Mary Smith, and I come from a long line of Democrats, and I voted for Obama and for Biden. | |
| But I had a friend that was very politically astute who informed me that Biden was pro-abortion up to the ninth month, and I'm a pro-life person. | ||
| So I made a 180 and became a Republican. | ||
| And then I started watching Newsmax and Fox Nation, and I became a conservative Republican. | ||
| And I will be watching the president tonight. | ||
| And I appreciate your show very much today. | ||
| All right. | ||
| And here's Carol in Illinois, line for Democrats. | ||
| Carol, are you there? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you for taking my call. | |
| I'm very concerned that all of our relatives died in the past to have our U.S. constitutional rights. | ||
| And Congress is not stepping up and doing their job. | ||
| What can we do to get Congress up doing their job instead of taking away from the people and giving it all to the oligarchs? | ||
| It doesn't hurt them, but it hurts the American people. | ||
| And that's money. | ||
| What do you think very much? | ||
| Well, thanks for the question, Carol. | ||
| I say there's some complicated reasons why Congress is sort of shirking its responsibilities in our time. | ||
| Part of it is the change in the media environment. | ||
| Members of Congress can sort of reach a huge crowd of people on social media and get rewards from those kinds of interactions, including raising funds from all around the country. | ||
| That sort of incentivizes them to the sort of spectacle rather than the hard work of policymaking. | ||
| And I think a lot of our members of Congress today need to remember that their job is to be a lawmaker and to really figure out how they can get together with all the other members who come from all around the country, work through the country's difficult problems, and figure out some compromises that we can all live with. | ||
| If we do that, we end up with laws and policies that are acceptable, broadly acceptable, and that can endure, that won't just snap back and forth when the control of the White House changes hands. | ||
| The way we have it now, where so many members of Congress are just cheerleading or jeering the president, depending on whether their party is in control of it, we really get a kind of whiplash, and that's not healthy for our country. | ||
| Here is Stephanie in South Carolina, Independent Line. | ||
| Good morning. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| If I'm a veteran and I'm calling because I'm concerned about the documents seized by the FBI when they raided Trump's house for the documents he stole during his first term, now I'm reading in the Washington Post, they're saying that those documents were returned to his house. | ||
| I'm wondering who's keeping an eye on that and why do those documents need to be at his house? | ||
| I'll be watching his speech tonight because I don't hear anybody reporting on this, and I'll be watching the speech for clues as to why he needs those documents at his house. | ||
| The same documents they stole before. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Not very related to the topic, but do you have any comment? | ||
|
unidentified
|
I would say that I don't know so much about the details about where the documents are today, but it does seem that the caller is right that people have moved on from this issue. | |
| Trump is the president now. | ||
| He has security clearance, obviously, for anything and everything. | ||
| So I think it's sort of become a non-issue. | ||
| Here's Carol, Republican in Pennsylvania. | ||
| Good morning, Carol. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good morning. | |
| Speaking to Mr. Wallach's point of the whiplash, we need checks and balances in the congressional procedures. | ||
| We have a seesaw effect that occurs when one party is in power. | ||
| The fact that the other party has no rights to bring things to the floor is unhealthy for our Congress. | ||
| And Joe Manchin has rightly said that 50% of the people are centrists. | ||
| And the way our system has evolved, it's just going whiplashing, as he said, between radical left and radical right. | ||
| Well, thank Carol for that comment. | ||
| I very much agree that the way we organize the procedures in both the House and the Senate today really cuts down on our members' ability to work things out and sort of look for bipartisan compromises where they can find them. | ||
| We have very leader-dominated institutions today relative to most of the history of Congress. | ||
| And the top partisan leaders, Republicans in both chambers today, have a very tight control over the agenda. | ||
| And we have a very sort of cramped lawmaking process. | ||
| We don't often see good sort of nose to the grindstone work in the committees leading to bipartisan bills that then get brought to the floor where other members have a chance to offer amendments. | ||
| That's really become very uncommon in our time. | ||
| And that process of lawmaking is good for building, again, compromises that we can all live with. | ||
| When we try to do everything through our top partisan leaders, they tend to think mostly about how things look for the next election, which again doesn't always motivate them to think about how can we calm things down. | ||
| Well, Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was speaking last month in Florida, and she was asked about the continued relevance of checks and balances and the power of Congress to appropriate funding. | ||
| So I'm going to play a portion and then get your response. | ||
| Our founders believed that they had created pretty, and they had and have created a pretty incredible checks and balances system. | ||
| The woman who asked Franklin, she said, do we have a monarchy or something else? | ||
| And his response was a republic. | ||
| Our founders were hell-bent on ensuring that we didn't have a monarchy. | ||
| And the first way they thought of that was to give Congress the power of the purse. | ||
| And because that's an incredible power. | ||
| They gave the presidency the power of the military. | ||
| And that's also, and that means not just armed forces, but law enforcement, which is an incredible obligation of a president. | ||
| They gave the courts the power to interpret. | ||
| And we have to do it by persuasion. | ||
| We have to, in our opinions, make it clear to the society, to the presidents, to the Congress, to the people, that we are doing things based on law and the Constitution as we are interpreting it fairly. | ||
| And so our goodwill or our power is the power of reason. | ||
| And that's most people would consider a soft power, but it's the most powerful of all of it. | ||
| Because money can be taken away by Congress. | ||
| If they give it, they can take it away. | ||
| A president has four years and he or she could be removed. | ||
| Those things are ephemeral in that sense of it. |