This is an adapted excerpt from the Dec. 11 episode of “The ReidOut.”
The United States Constitution enumerates three separate and co-equal branches of government: The legislative, the executive and the judicial. The idea was to prevent any one branch from becoming too powerful since people inside each would fight to defend their own power.
But now, those basic checks and balances enumerated in the Constitution are collapsing. Under Republicans, all three branches of our government are bowing down to the incoming president, Donald Trump. Case in point: FBI Director Christopher Wray has announced he will resign at the end of President Joe Biden’s term.
Tuberville and his fellow congressional supplicants are looking to blow up the Constitution because it restrains Trump’s powers too much.
“My goal is to keep the focus on our mission — the indispensable work you’re doing on behalf of the American people every day,” Wray told the FBI’s workforce Wednesday. “And in my view, this is the best way to avoid dragging the bureau deeper into the fray.”
In normal times, Wray, who was appointed by Trump during his first administration, would have served out his full term, through 2027. However, Wray, a Republican and a contributor to the conservative Federalist Society, was deemed insufficiently obsequious for Trump. Instead, Trump announced last month that he wants MAGA loyalist Kash Patel to take over Wray’s job.
Republican senators were more than willing to play the role of the president-elect’s marionettes. Take 91-year-old Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who on Monday issued a letter criticizing Wray for executing a search warrant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence to recover classified documents and for his handling of the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. Grassley suggested Wray and his deputy “move on.” The same day, he shared a photo on X of him shaking hands with Patel.
An even more obvious Trump appendage is Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama. “You’ve got several of these senators up here trying to be relevant and [I] want to do ‘my due diligence,’” Tuberville said Wednesday on the right-wing podcast “The Benny Show.”
“Wait a minute, the people of Alabama gave a referendum to me. They said, ‘You vote for whatever Donald Trump wants.’ And that’s exactly what I’m doing. These people from the Senate, the senator from Alaska — Donald Trump wins Alaska — she’s gonna be judge and jury over Donald Trump’s picks? I don’t understand this.”
It’s no surprise that Tuberville doesn’t understand his explicit Article II, clause 2 constitutional duty to advise the president on and consent or refuse the appointment of judges, secretaries and ambassadors since this is the same guy who thinks the branches of government are “the House, the Senate and the executive.”
Tuberville is proudly displaying the corrosive effects of Trump’s grip on America, where he and his fellow congressional supplicants are looking to blow up the Constitution because it restrains Trump’s powers too much. What they want for America is a model based on Russia and Hungary where their leaders — Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orbán, respectively — have demolished the system of checks and balances and installed loyalists. The ruling parties control the media, their parliaments and pretty much everything else. Independence is reviled and rejected.
Here in the U.S., it’s called the “unitary executive theory,” a popular conservative concept that says a president has sole authority over the executive branch. Trump, Elon Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, the conservative-majority Supreme Court, and the president-elect’s Project 2025 friends like Russell Vought all believe that the president deserves total power, despite this country’s founders having fought a literal war to withdraw from a monarchy.
In Trump’s America, the president should be immune from prosecution for allegedly mishandling classified documents or their efforts to overthrow an election or maybe even directing SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival (as Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned could be deemed constitutional under the Supreme Court’s July 1 immunity ruling). But it doesn’t stop there; Republicans also want to expand the president’s powers to include something called impoundment.
Impoundment is the idea that the president has the constitutional authority to withhold, or “impound,” money from projects approved by Congress. Trump has already surrounded himself with players who want to get him that historic expansion of power, including Mark Paoletta, who will return as general counsel of the Office of Management and Budget, working closely with Vought.
Paoletta, who happens to be close buddies with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and his wife, Ginni Thomas, has argued repeatedly for broad impoundment power. His singular goal at OMB seems to be giving Trump, not Congress, the power of the purse.
Musk and Ramaswamy, Trump’s picks to run the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, hold similar views. In their November op-ed for The Wall Street Journal, the pair wrote:
Skeptics question how much federal spending DOGE can tame through executive action alone. They point to the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which stops the president from ceasing expenditures authorized by Congress. Mr. Trump has previously suggested this statute is unconstitutional, and we believe the current Supreme Court would likely side with him on this question.
What they are referring to is a law signed by Congress after President Richard Nixon tried what Trump is likely going to attempt. Nixon refused to spend money that Congress had appropriated for several programs. The move was so brazen that William Rehnquist, the head of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel who would later serve on the Supreme Court, wrote a memo stating that there is no constitutional right for the president to do that.
The courts agreed and so lawmakers went ahead and passed a law reasserting Congress’ power of the purse. However, they did set up a process through which presidents could impound funds but only with Congress’ participation.
This brings us back to today, with a Congress willing to do whatever Trump wants, and a Supreme Court that likely agrees the president-elect should have the freedom to do whatever he wants with his so-called unitary executive power.
Allison Detzel contributed.
Joy-Ann Reid
Joy-Ann Reid is host of “The ReidOut” at 7 p.m. ET on MSNBC. “The ReidOut” features one-on-one conversations with politicians and newsmakers while addressing provocative political issues both inside and outside of the beltway.