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| On one and two, but programs like Washington Journal that allow policymakers, lawmakers, personalities to come on and have this question time during Washington Journal. | ||
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So it's a huge benefit. | |
| I hope that all these streaming services carry C-SPAN as well, because it's an important service to the American people. | ||
| I'm actually thrilled that this time in Washington Journal, I'm getting a lot of really substantive questions from across the political aisle. | ||
| Our country would be a better place if every American just watched one hour a week. | ||
| They could pick one, two, or three. | ||
| Just one hour a week, and we'd all be a much better country. | ||
| thank you for your service. | ||
| A conversation now on the shutdown and presidential powers are Our guest is University of Maryland School of Public Policy professor Philip Joyce. | ||
| And Professor Joyce, in a recent column, you wrote this in government executive. | ||
| When the government shutdown ends, Donald Trump will have succeeded in staging the single biggest expansion of presidential powers in American history because of the single largest shift in the constitutional balance of powers ever. | ||
| Explain. | ||
| Well, I think that the first thing to understand is that government shutdowns, as bad as they are, actually confer a great deal of power to the executive branch in making decisions about, for example, who's going to work and who's not going to work, what programs and policies are going to continue and what programs and policies are not going to continue. | ||
| But you go beyond that, you know, he has really taken this opportunity to try to do many of the things that he wanted to do anyway. | ||
| And so he's done something that no other president has ever done, which is to use this as an excuse to lay off employees, for example. | ||
| And then, you know, the particular, in my own view, the sort of particular thing that sort of caused me, gave me pause, I would say, is when he decided to pay the troops using an appropriation that was not for that purpose. | ||
| I have no qualms about paying the troops. | ||
| I think troops should be paid. | ||
| I think everyone should be paid. | ||
| But what he did was took funds that had been made available for one purpose and used them for a completely different purpose. | ||
| So once you have that kind of control over the budget, it's very hard to sort of see where that ends. | ||
| Why is that something that gives a constitutional scholar pause? | ||
| What's the concern there? | ||
| Well, I should say first, I'm not a constitutional scholar, but you know. | ||
| Professor of public policy. | ||
| Well, I don't play one on television, but I will say that clause 7 of Article 1, Section 9 of the Constitution says, and I'm going to read this, no money shall be drawn from the Treasury but in consequences of appropriations made by law. | ||
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The fact is that who makes those appropriations by law? | |
| The legislative branch. | ||
| The legislative branch. | ||
| And when the legislative branch makes appropriations, it doesn't just give the president or even the Department of Defense a big lump sum and say, spend it however you want. | ||
| There are more than a thousand appropriation accounts in the federal budget, and those appropriation accounts are first and foremost, sort of limits on what can be spent for any particular item. | ||
| And what the Trump administration did in this case was they took an appropriation that was for research and development in the Department of Defense, and they used that appropriation to make payments for military personnel. | ||
| And that's not the purpose for which that appropriation was made. | ||
| And so once the president can decide that he wants to take any pot of money and spend it for anything he wants to, that does sort of great damage to the power of the purse. | ||
| And the founders were very concerned that The Congress possessed the power of the purse at the risk of reading another quote. | ||
| I'm going to do it anyway. | ||
| Madison in Federalist 58 said the power of the purse may in fact be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any Constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people. | ||
| There's a reason that the founders thought that the power of the purse should rest in the Congress, and part of the power of the purse resting in the Congress means that Congress should get to decide, of course, with the President's agreement, when the President signs appropriation bills, what money can be spent for. | ||
| But once that's happened, then the President should be bound to spend money in that way. | ||
| Is this just a function of the President's party controlling both the House and the Senate? | ||
| And that if and when it happens that one party, the opposition party, gains control of one chamber, then Congress will reassert itself. | ||
| There will be investigations. | ||
| There will be objections being raised to this. | ||
| I guess that's possible, but you have to ask yourself the question whether the horse is out of the barn at that point. | ||
| And what we don't know is we don't know what the courts are going to rule on this. | ||
| I've been very careful to not just declare that something is unconstitutional because what's constitutional is dependent on what ultimately the Supreme Court says is constitutional. | ||
| So if there's a challenge to this at some point and the Supreme Court says it's okay, that's the point at which we are saying that this could be a permanent shift of power from the Congress to the executive. | ||
| Bring me back to other times when a president's party had super majorities in the House and Senate. | ||
| Lyndon Johnson had supermajorities. | ||
| Did this sort of thing happen under Lyndon Johnson? | ||
| No. | ||
| This sort of thing did not happen under Lyndon Johnson. | ||
| As far as I'm aware, this kind of thing has not happened under any other president. | ||
| This is one of the things that makes shutdowns end is that people are not able to be paid. | ||
| And in the case of the military, there has always been legal provision made for the military to be paid. | ||
| And so the difference here is that because the House hasn't been in session for more than a month, in part, there was not any legal way to get the, in my opinion, there's not a legal way independent of the Congress acting to get the military paid, which is why they turned to what I think arguably is a sort of extra-legal way to do this. | ||
| Has the Trump administration broken any laws? | ||
| I think it is arguable that the Trump administration has broken a law called the Anti-Deficiency Act. | ||
| What is that? | ||
| The Anti-Deficiency Act was a law that was created in 1870, and it was created in response to the fact that federal agencies had the habit of spending more money than they had and then coming to the Congress and saying, well, make us whole now. | ||
| And so what the Anti-Deficiency Act did is it said, not only are you not allowed to spend money that you don't have, but you're not allowed to spend money on things that that money was not provided for. | ||
| And so when the Trump administration took the research and development funding and used it to pay the troops, you know, people who have studied this more carefully and in a more detailed way than I have argued that that is a clear violation of the Anti-Deficiency Act. | ||
| Now, I have read the talking points from the administration about why they think this is legal, and I should be clear that they do think this is legal. | ||
| I should also be clear that I'm not persuaded by their argument. | ||
| What is the Impoundment Control Act of 1974? | ||
| The Empoundment Control Act of 1974 is almost the reverse of the Anti-Deficiency Act. | ||
| What the Empowerment Control Act of 1974 says is that a president cannot refuse to spend money that has been appropriated by Congress just because the president doesn't agree with the thing that is being funded. | ||
| And so a lot of the things that, and this, by the way, was passed in response to President Richard Nixon's actions in the late 60s and early 1970s when President Nixon would do exactly that. | ||
| What he would do is he would sign appropriation bills that have been passed by the Congress, and then he would say, well, I don't really like this program, so I'm not going to spend money on it. | ||
| And so the courts stepped in initially to say that there's nothing in the Constitution that permits a president to unilaterally cancel funds or appropriations that have been passed by Congress. | ||
| So what the Empowerment Control Act did was it actually set up a procedure. | ||
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You can watch this in its entirety online at c-span.org. | |
| We take you live down to a discussion on the Justice Department and its ability to act independent from the White House. |