Trump attack on Left-wing bias on TV sparks ‘constitutional crisis'

Telegraph

3 hours ago

Elon Musk may have stepped aside, but Donald Trump still has a Doge problem.
The US president's plan to run a scythe through up to $425bn (£316bn) of government spending could be gutted or even vetoed in the Senate, where just a few rebel Republicans could scupper the cuts.
But Trump and Russell Vought, his budget tsar, have hatched a scheme, called a 'pocket rescission', that might keep the Doge (department of government efficiency) dream on track. And it could even shift the constitutional balance of power between president and Congress towards a testy Trump.
It's a high-risk, high-stakes strategy. The outcome will determine whether the Doge spending reductions can go ahead, helping to pay for Trump's 'big, beautiful' tax cuts without blowing out the budget and rattling the bond markets.
But the unprecedented procedure takes the White House and Capitol Hill into uncharted legal waters. So it is likely to end up in the courts – joining a raft of litigation that will either reinforce the institutional checks on the president's power or unleash him.
'It's a challenge to Congress,' says Sarah Binder, a political scientist at the Brookings Institution and George Washington University. 'I don't like to throw around the term 'constitutional crisis', but it's not a great position for lawmakers and institutions.'
Under the constitution, Congress has the so-called power of the purse, meaning that lawmakers, not the president, are the final arbiter of what the government spends or does not spend.
If the president wants to cut funding or programmes that Congress has already authorised, his only option is to launch a rescission procedure – a formal request for the cuts, which both houses of Congress must approve.
The rescission process was introduced in a law called the Impoundment Control Act, which had the overall aim of making it hard for Richard Nixon, the then-president, and his successors from delaying or withholding funds once Congress had green-lighted them.
Rescission has seldom been used. Ronald Reagan used it to secure $15.2bn of spending cuts as president in the early 1980s, but later in the decade, Congress tended to ignore or refuse his rescission messages.
Trump tried it on with a $15bn-plus request in his first term, but was stymied in the Senate. The Democrats then got control of Congress in the midterms and pushed back another $27bn salvo.
Now Trump is trying again. The initial proposal – Vought says it will be 'the first of many' – is to scuttle $9.4bn of spending on public broadcasters and international aid programmes. This rescission was flagged back in March but formally put to Congress only this month.
In an executive order early last month, Trump said he wanted to terminate all public funding of National Public Radio (NPR) and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), which accounts for about $1bn of this first rescission package.
'Which viewpoints NPR and PBS promote does not matter. What does matter is that neither entity presents a fair, accurate or unbiased portrayal of current events to tax-paying citizens,' Trump said.
'Today the media landscape is filled with abundant, diverse, and innovative news options. Government funding of news media in this environment is not only outdated and unnecessary but corrosive to the appearance of journalistic independence.'
The White House has until July 18 to persuade Congress. The rescission scraped through the House of Representatives by 214 votes to 212, but the Senate is the real test. If just four Republicans in the 100-seat upper house swap sides, the spending stays in place.
It's not looking promising for Trump. Several Republicans have already voiced concern about at least some of the cuts. The dissenters include Senator Susan Collins, who chairs an influential Senate finance committee that will consider the cuts at a session on June 25.
There could be fireworks. Vought will appear before the committee and, in recent weeks, he has started airing the possibility of bypassing Congress altogether through an untested and almost unknown variant of rescission: the so-called pocket rescission.
'It's a provision that has been rarely used, but it is there,' Vought told CNN. 'And we intend to use all of these tools.'
The trick with the pocket rescission is to make the request to Congress right before the end of the fiscal year, which runs to Sept 30.
The White House reckons that the Impoundment Control Act's wording creates a loophole: if Congress does not act on the request before Sept 30, then even if the window is well short of 45 days the spending approval will lapse automatically on that date.
The case for pocket rescissions was made recently by Wade Miller, of the Center for Renewing America (CRA), a Right-wing think tank.
'A rescission is a viable tool for carrying out the broader political mandate to curb unnecessary spending,' he wrote in a briefing paper.
'If the executive branch decides to use this process, the deployment of a rescission with fewer than 45 days remaining in the fiscal year is a statutorily and constitutionally valid strategy.'
The CRA was set up by Vought himself, after he served as director of the Office of Management and Budget in the final six months of Trump's first term. He returned to the White House with the president this January, in the same role.
But other Washington think tanks trenchantly oppose the CRA's position.
'Calling it a pocket rescission implies that it's like an actual functional tool under the law, in a way that it's actually not. It is a strategy that the person who is running the Office of Management and Budget has articulated to evade the law,' says Cerin Lindgrensavage, a lawyer at Protect Democracy.
She says the whole purpose of the Impoundment Control Act was to stop any presidential ploy to skirt its strictures.
'One of the reasons why they might want to do this is because they're afraid they don't have the votes to actually make the cuts the legal way.'
Binder, from Brookings, says that the Act doesn't explicitly deal with what happens if a president makes the request right before the end of the fiscal year.
'There's certainly room here for an aggressive Office of Management and Budget and an aggressive administration to try to stretch – others might say manipulate – the silence in the budget law,' she says.
'But the logic of the matter suggests that pocket rescissions are not legal under the Act and I would imagine there's a strong argument that they are unconstitutional under Congress's power of the purse.'
Binder suspects Vought is looking to get a test case into the courts. Given there could be a constitutional principle at stake, it could go all the way to the Supreme Court, where a majority of judges are Republican appointees.
In the meantime, litigants could get restraining orders or injunctions to prevent the Doge cuts. But they can't necessarily get the White House to respect these.
The stage is set for a constitutional showdown. The question is whether Trump and Vought will really pull the trigger. And then, whether the weapon will actually work.