Conservative mocks GOP Congress: You've already handed all your power to Trump

Republicans' capture of unified control of Congress could cost them, wrote conservative analyst George Will for The Washington Post — because aside from their vulnerable position in the 2026 midterms, Congress Republicans won't have a lot of power with President-elect Donald Trump back in charge.

Will, a frequent critic of the modern MAGA movement, reminded Republicans just how much power the executive branch has claimed for its own over recent decades — and how dysfunctional Congress has become by comparison, a trend that isn't likely to reverse with the infighting erupting even before the GOP took control.

"How are you coping with the stress of life during today’s 43 'emergencies'?" wrote Will. "That’s how many of the 79 declared by executive orders or proclamations since 1979 are still extant. Several statutes empower the president to declare emergencies, thereby acquiring (by the count of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School) more than 130 standby statutory powers. The Cato Institute’s Gene Healy, in 2024 Senate testimony, said a 1934 law empowers the president to seize or close 'any facility or station for wire communication' once he proclaims a threat of war. This, Healy said, is 'a potential internet ‘kill switch.’'"

We are now living under a "presidentialism ethos," wrote Will, where "the president, not Congress, is supposed to set the nation’s agenda and dominate its political conversation. And congressional members of the president’s party are expected to be almost completely compliant." This was not always so, he noted — in Abraham Lincoln's day, for instance, it was considered impudent for a president even to propose Congress pass specific legislation.

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These days, he added, presidents legislate more than Congress themselves, through agency rulemaking.

What is clear, Will concluded, is that regardless of whether the unified Republican Congress tries to assert any kind of power independent of Trump, it is unlikely to last very long.

"In the nine presidential elections beginning in 1992, Democrats have won control of the presidency and both houses of Congress three times (1992, 2008, 2020), Republicans four times (2000, 2004, 2016, 2024)," he wrote. "None of these seven unified governments survived into a third year."