• Home
  • Opinion
  • Quizzes
  • Redistricting
  • Sections
  • About Us
  • Voting
  • Events
  • Civic Ed
  • Campaign Finance
  • Directory
  • Election Dissection
  • Fact Check
  • Glossary
  • Independent Voter News
  • News
  • Analysis
  • Subscriptions
  • Log in
Leveraging Our Differences
  • news & opinion
    • Big Picture
      • Civic Ed
      • Ethics
      • Leadership
      • Leveraging big ideas
      • Media
    • Business & Democracy
      • Corporate Responsibility
      • Impact Investment
      • Innovation & Incubation
      • Small Businesses
      • Stakeholder Capitalism
    • Elections
      • Campaign Finance
      • Independent Voter News
      • Redistricting
      • Voting
    • Government
      • Balance of Power
      • Budgeting
      • Congress
      • Judicial
      • Local
      • State
      • White House
    • Justice
      • Accountability
      • Anti-corruption
      • Budget equity
    • Columns
      • Beyond Right and Left
      • Civic Soul
      • Congress at a Crossroads
      • Cross-Partisan Visions
      • Democracy Pie
      • Our Freedom
  • Pop Culture
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
      • American Heroes
      • Ask Joe
      • Celebrity News
      • Comedy
      • Dance, Theatre & Film
      • Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging
      • Faithful & Mindful Living
      • Music, Poetry & Arts
      • Sports
      • Technology
      • Your Take
  • events
  • About
      • Mission
      • Advisory Board
      • Staff
      • Contact Us
Sign Up
  1. Home>
  2. Balance of Power>
  3. trump administration>

Trump is dissolving Congress in plain sight, and immigration's a top example

David Hernández
April 10, 2020
President Trump signs executive order

President Trump has been enabled by the Supreme Court, which has given the green light to his practice of governing through fiat, proclamations and executive orders, writes professor David Hernández.

Pool/Getty Images

Hernández is on leave this semester as an associate professor of Latina and Latino studies at Mount Holyoke College.

The Trump administration's power grab during the new coronavirus pandemic is well underway.

But even before the Covid-19 outbreak, President Trump was out-maneuvering the principal obligations of Congress — funding and providing oversight of the executive branch, and setting policy through legislation — by deploying executive orders, rule changes, fee schedules and international agreements to minimize the power of the legislative branch during his presidency.

The clearest and most calculated form of this congressional suspension can be found in immigration policy-making, seeking to change the flow of migration to this country while altering the democratic system of checks and balances.


Most dramatically, the administration has choked off the asylum process with both blunted tools, such as family separation, and refined instruments, such as the "remain in Mexico" Migrant Protection Protocols from the Department of Homeland Security and ludicrous safe third-country agreements.

On top of this has been a revolving door of "acting" directors for federal agencies, which is Trump's preference because those temporary appointments dodge the Senate confirmation process and evade existing laws for filling government vacancies. Trump buttresses his congressional end run with bombastic anti-immigrant rhetoric, inspiring violence against migrants, even telling non-white members of Congress to "go back" to where they came from.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Trump's authoritarianism, disdain for Congress and end runs around the legislative branch are on display daily, upending migration policies through both executive power and bureaucratic gamesmanship while the president avoids even proposing, much less signing, any legislation. Opening his presidency with two immigration enforcement executive orders and his versatile travel ban (targeting Muslims, then Africans and others, and now what he calls a "foreign virus"), Trump recently intensified his assault on lawful migration by instituting a "wealth test" on persons seeking entry and adjustment of status.

His pet project, the border wall, is being built with money taken from other congressional funding sources, and Trump has effectively rewritten the legislative appropriations process in order to punitively defund sanctuary cities.

The president has additional tools in the executive shed to keep Congress at bay. Besides name-calling and personal threats to adversaries, Trump has wielded pardons and even promises of pardons for supporters who commit crimes on his behalf. In addition, the running tally of false or misleading statements by the president, documented by The Washington Post, reached 16,241 (an average of 15 a day) only three years into his presidency. Such purported "alternative facts" challenge climate science, hurricane pathways and death tolls — and his own Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as the nation intensified its combat against the coronavirus.

The administration's patient and methodical diminishment of checks and balances has used existing administrative powers, and new ones invented as needed, to flout congressional authority. It is a sharp contrast to Trump's brazen policy decisions and reversals, and his plainly outrageous behavior. Who needs a Congress when you can openly defy it, even without the cover of a global pandemic, and take baby steps toward authoritarianism by legislating from the Oval Office?

Of course, Trump has had a partner in this effort. The Supreme Court is an active supporter of the president's agenda, rarely holding him in check and, more often, delivering special procedural favors and majority rulings to protect White House policies enacted through fiat, proclamations and executive orders.

In the immigration area alone, this has included permitting the administration to deny federal aid to sanctuary cities, pilfer funds from other programs for the border wall, maintain racially tinged travel bans and smother the asylum process.

Trump has meddled in the courts too, even recently demanding that Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor "recuse themselves on all ... Trump related matters!" But the conservative majority has sided with the president on most everything, benefitting "one litigant over all others," wrote Sotomayor. Trump and the high court have turned Congress into a despised middle child, dashing any illusions of a balance of coequal government branches.

With the Supreme Court firewall at the ready, the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals recently punted on a case that effectively nullified Congress' subpoena power, ruling that when he was White House counsel Don McGahn was free to defy a congressional subpoena upon Trump's orders, potentially stifling all future investigations into the White House. Trump's rogue defiance — in fact, during the impeachment trial, Senate Republicans argued that the lack of subpoenas was evidence of an absence of due diligence by Democrats — is no longer rogue, but simply lawful.

The president and his bureaucrats have been proceeding diligently, dissolving Congress in plain sight by administrative means. This is Trump's central method for doing dirt, the supreme manifestation of his long-signaled views about authoritarianism — whether stiffing workers and contractors as a private citizen, pinning medals on his favorite extremists, pardoning friends or circumventing congressional power at every turn.

How this has shaped immigration policy is extremely important, but it's only one of so many examples.

Voters will have a say in November, we hope. But their elected representatives must start insisting on having much more of a say, before it's too late.

From Your Site Articles
  • The instruction manual for autocratic governing was written just ... ›
  • Will Congress Fight for Its Right to Govern? - The Fulcrum ›
  • Hill GOP abandons constitutional heritage and Watergate ... ›
  • The coronavirus response: Trump vs. the states - The Fulcrum ›
  • Latin America's lessons about autocrats unpunished - The Fulcrum ›
  • Costs, dysfunction block immigrants' path to citizenship - The Fulcrum ›
  • Headlines and rhetoric from the border don't match reality - The Fulcrum ›
Related Articles Around the Web
  • Must Reads: What's behind all those executive orders Trump loves ... ›
  • Trump used to call presidential executive orders 'power grabs.' Not ... ›
  • Presidential Actions | The White House ›
trump administration

Want to write
for The Fulcrum?

If you have something to say about ways to protect or repair our American democracy, we want to hear from you.

Submit
Get some Leverage Sign up for The Fulcrum Newsletter
Follow
Contributors

Reform in 2023: Leadership worth celebrating

Layla Zaidane

Two technology balancing acts

Dave Anderson

Reform in 2023: It’s time for the civil rights community to embrace independent voters

Jeremy Gruber

Congress’ fix to presidential votes lights the way for broader election reform

Kevin Johnson

Democrats and Republicans want the status quo, but we need to move Forward

Christine Todd Whitman

Reform in 2023: Building a beacon of hope in Boston

Henry Santana
Jerren Chang
latest News

Flame retardants in your earbuds? Toxic chemicals in homes? Left and right are sick of It.

Joan Blades
John Gable
5h

What can replace religion for peace of mind and shared moral values?

Daniel O. Jamison
5h

Part IV: Reforming constitutional convention campaigns

J.H. Snider
30 January

Winning GOP strategy in 2024 – back to business with immigration reform

Neil Hare
30 January

Podcast: Separating news from noise

Our Staff
30 January

Podcast: Deepening democracy in the states

Our Staff
27 January
Videos

Video: What the speakership election tells us about the 118th Congress webinar

Our Staff

Video: We need more bipartisan commitment to democracy: Pennsylvania governor

Our Staff

Video: Meet the citizen activists championing primary reform

Our Staff

Video: Veterans for Political Innovation - Who we are

Our Staff

Video: Want to fight polarization? Take a vacation!

Our Staff

Video: Kevin McCarthy is Speaker, but he's got a tough job ahead

Our Staff
Podcasts

Podcast: Separating news from noise

Our Staff
30 January

Podcast: Deepening democracy in the states

Our Staff
27 January

Podcast: How the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack impacted politics

Our Staff
26 January

Podcast: Why we misunderstand independent voters

Our Staff
25 January
Recommended
Flame retardants in your earbuds? Toxic chemicals in homes? Left and right are sick of It.

Flame retardants in your earbuds? Toxic chemicals in homes? Left and right are sick of It.

Big Picture
What can replace religion for peace of mind and shared moral values?

What can replace religion for peace of mind and shared moral values?

Big Picture
Video: What the speakership election tells us about the 118th Congress webinar

Video: What the speakership election tells us about the 118th Congress webinar

Congress
Part IV: Reforming constitutional convention campaigns

Part IV: Reforming constitutional convention campaigns

State
Winning GOP strategy in 2024 – back to business with immigration reform

Winning GOP strategy in 2024 – back to business with immigration reform

Big Picture
Podcast: Separating news from noise

Podcast: Separating news from noise

Podcasts