Checks and balances can only work if government officials are willing to use their authority to check abuses of power by others. Without that, our Constitution is an empty promise.
And without the will to stand up to such abuses, freedom and democracy also become empty promises. As James Madison wrote in Federalist 51, the Constitution was designed to ensure that “the interior structure of the government as that its several constituent parts may, by their mutual relations, be the means of keeping each other in their proper places.”
In this design, he argued, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place….you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.”
That is why it matters whether Congress is willing to do its job of controlling the Executive. This has never been truer than it is today.
Let’s face it, the presidency is now much more powerful than Congress. Powerful and, as a result, a danger to liberty.
That was true before Donald Trump returned to the Oval Office. It has only become more apparent since then. In response, congressional Republicans have been unwilling to use their authority to rein him in.
No news there. Still, it was shocking to see Attorney General Pam Bondi’s open contempt for Congress displayed in her appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, October 7.
It was also shocking to watch Republican Senators cheer her on as she denigrated their Democratic committee colleagues. Both were unprecedented.
Both suggest that our constitutional system is broken and that while Republicans may give lip service to that system, they are guilty of aiding and abetting in its overthrow. In criminal law, someone aids and abets the commission of a crime by another when they intend to assist or participate in that offense.
They can do so by encouraging or facilitating it.
Don’t get me wrong. I am not suggesting that Republicans on the Judiciary Committee are guilty of a crime in the ordinary sense.
They are, however, guilty of aiding and abetting Pam Bondi’s and Donald Trump’s crimes against the Constitution. Fidelity to that document requires that we call out their behavior in the strongest terms.
Let’s start with contempt of Congress. The law defines it as willfully refusing “ to answer any question pertinent to the question under inquiry".
During her appearance before the Judiciary Committee, Bondi refused to answer a long list of questions pertinent to its oversight inquiry. Among them, as California Democratic Senator Adam Schiff pointed out were questions about possible bribery involving Trump border czar Tom Homan, criminal investigations into the president’s political opponents initiated at the behest of the president himself, and the firing of career prosecutors in the Department of Justice.
Those are just a few of the questions the Attorney General batted aside. Committee Chair, Republican Senator Charles Grassley, sat quietly as she stonewalled his colleagues. And when he was not silent, he tried to derail the inquiry by shifting the focus to the behavior of the Biden Justice Department.
Grassley’s opening remarks foretold what was to come. He went on at length about "weaponization" of the Justice Department under the Biden Administration. He characterized investigations of then-former President Trump as “indefensible acts.”This was a political fishing expedition to get Trump at all costs."
Grassley was joined, as Politico reports, by Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, who “falsely claimed…that newly disclosed records revealed that the FBI ‘tapped’ the phones of eight sitting U.S. senators during special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation of President Donald Trump’s bid to subvert the 2020 election.”
Not surprisingly, “Attorney General Pam Bondi, during her Tuesday testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, did not correct Hawley’s characterization of the records.”
But Bondi’s performance was not limited to her refusal to answer questions or to correct erroneous information. She used her appearance to attack Democratic Senators directly, offering up accusations or allegations of misconduct that had nothing to do with the hearing.
She called out Illinois Senator Richard Durbin. “You are sitting here as law enforcement officers aren't being paid. They're out there working to protect you. I wish you love Chicago as much as you hate President Trump.”
In response to a question from California Senator Adan Schiff, Bondi replied, “If you worked for me, you would’ve been fired because you were censured by Congress for lying.”
She accused Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal of misrepresenting his military record. She claimed that Rhode Island Senator Sheldon Whitehouse had ties to “dark money” groups and backed legislation that would “subsidize [his] wife’s company.”
Such personal attacks would not have been allowed under Senate rules if they had been made on the Senate floor during a debate. But Chairman Grassley did nothing, and neither did any of his Republican colleagues.
James Madison would be rolling over in his grave to know that Senators of either party would condone such behavior by a member of the Executive Branch. He would have seen it as a crime against the constitutional order he worked so assiduously to construct.
But welcome to America’s new world. It is defined by a cabal that has set out to undermine checks and balances.
Pam Bondi and Republican Senators showed what that looks like. Americans should not shut their eyes and imagine that the constitutional system will survive their assault on it without a large and sustained public response.
Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.