In 2016 alone, House Republicans issued more than 70 subpoenas or investigative inquiries into Hillary Clinton and her private server.
Many of those same Republicans are now shrugging off fears that Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency — a.k.a. DOGE — are flouting government protocols while scouring government databases in their effort to purge federal workers.
But Republicans are about to have a reckoning. Last summer the Supreme Court gave this Congress homework — work policymakers on Capitol Hill haven’t had to do in the past 40 or so years: Write precise rules and regulations instead of leaning on experts in federal agencies to flesh out the policy specifics after Congress passes a bill.
It’s unclear if the contemporary Congress is up to the serious task of policymaking, especially the 119th Congress, which is brimming with technophiles focused on clicks, viral videos and digital dunking.
In the month since Trump took his oath of office, critics say, instead of standing up for Congress and flexing the new powers the Supreme Court bestowed on the institution, congressional Republicans have all but surrendered their oversight responsibilities as they’ve ceded unprecedented power to President Donald Trump and his billionaire sidekick, Elon Musk.
All this talk of a ‘constitutional crisis’ may be a tad premature. What’s certain is America’s in the midst of a congressional crisis — one the current Congress may not be able to withstand.
In more than a dozen exclusive interviews, Republicans on Capitol Hill tell Raw Story not to rule Congress out yet, even as critics fear there’s not going to be much power left for legislators to reclaim with the GOP ceding so much legislative turf to Trump and DOGE at the start of this new administration.
“I'm delighted”
Several Republicans who spoke to Raw Story are cheering for Musk and Trump to dismantle the very federal government set up by Congress in recent years and decades.
“Do you worry that you guys are ceding a little too much power?” Raw Story asked Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-WY) while walking through the Capitol.
“Well, I hate to say this, but the only way it's going to happen, in my opinion, is if we let them do it the way they're doing it. Otherwise, it won't get done. So I'm delighted,” Lummis — who was a member of the far-right, Constitution-wagging Freedom Caucus when she served in the House — told Raw Story. “I mean, really, really delighted with the way that Trump is allowing the DOGE people to audit.”
Team Trump is set on upending, dismantling, overhauling or outright deleting government websites, grants, programs, agencies, protocols and even federal employees themselves.
The courts are now dealing with an onslaught of legal challenges to this new MAGA administration. All those cases will take time to wind through the judiciary, but the Supreme Court’s already spoken.
Last June, the Supreme Court issued new, norm-upending marching orders to Congress when, in a 6-3 ruling, the majority of justices overturned a pivotal, if wonky, 1984 decision when the Roberts Court obliterated the so-called Chevron doctrine, which enabled experts in federal agencies to write rules and regulations never explicitly spelled out by Congress.
That means, Congress’ crutch is gone. It remains unclear if lawmakers will be able to stand on their own and master the jot and tittle of measures they send to the president’s desk.
But for now, at least, Republican majorities on Capitol Hill seem fine outsourcing the legislative branch’s powers to Trump and his White House.
“We're witnessing the collapse of a lot of constitutional boundaries”
In spite of claiming otherwise, DOGE and its unelected leader, Elon Musk, are so opaque, it’s unclear just how their tech is set up. But IT experts say they seem to be operating their own, non-governmental server.
While a case winds through federal courts, Republicans on Capitol Hill are fine with giving Musk, basically, whatever he wants.
“Like, with Musk, I was playing back the tape, you guys were really hard on Hillary for her server,” Raw Story recently pressed House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH). “Is there a double standard here?”
“No, not a double standard. I mean, Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, after the policy decisions that administration made led to — and security decisions that the administration made — led to the deaths of Americans in Benghazi, Libya,” Jordan — the second most senior Republican on the Oversight Committee — told Raw Story. “And then we find out 60,000 emails, and she destroyed, like, 30,000 of them. You gotta be kidding me.”
“So just having the server isn’t the problem?” Raw Story pressed.
“Right. Musk isn't destroying anything,” Jordan said. “He just wants to know where your money’s being spent.”
Democrats agree on one point. They say there’s literally no comparing ‘her emails’ to the work Musk’s conducting in secret.
“No, the two are not comparable, in that Elon is in a class by himself. It's not just the server, but the unfettered power that Trump’s given him,” Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) told Raw Story. “But I think it's important in talking about him to remember, everything he does is empowered by Trump. Good cop, bad cop.”
To congressional Republicans, Trump and Musk are both playing good cop.
“I'm amazed,” Jordan said. “The Trump administration is up to the most intense and focused start of any administration, certainly in my lifetime. I think the American people appreciate the focused, intense, on-offense type of start to this administration.”
“Are you afraid that Congress could be ceding a little bit of its authority — too much of its authority — to the White House and an unelected official?” Raw Story asked.
“No. I think you have this focused effort by DOGE to identify stupid things that the federal government’s spending money on,” Jordan said. “And I think when the American people see that, they're like, ‘Well, that's ridiculous. Of course, we need to change that.’”
Democrats aren’t surprised by much these days. Still, many are astounded watching GOP leaders on Capitol Hill outsource their legislative responsibilities to officials across the Trump administration set on canceling decade’s worth of congressional work — from bipartisan foreign aid programs to nonpartisan domestic food assistance programs.
“There's a shameful abdication of legislative power and responsibility by the GOP majority to the executive branch and the executive branch's lawless delegate,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) — a constitutional scholar by trade — told Raw Story. “We're seeing tremendous erosion of our constitutional edifice.”
Raskin finds the blurred lines between Musk’s work at DOGE and the billions of dollars in federal contracts his companies, like SpaceX, receive beyond troubling.
“We're witnessing the collapse of a lot of constitutional boundaries,” Raskin — the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee — said. “You know, we have this extraordinary convergence of governmental power with corporate power to the extent that a major federal contractor collecting billions from the taxpayers is now also a federal government employee purporting to oversee federal spending.”
Unlike Trump’s first administration, today’s Trump-centric GOP is unified at the Capitol, at least when it comes to oversight, which Raskin says isn’t taking place in spite of Republican rhetoric claiming otherwise.
“They keep talking about, you know, what a great job Elon Musk is doing on oversight when we have an Oversight Committee. The Judiciary Committee has an oversight subcommittee. All of Congress is supposed to be doing oversight as a central part of our responsibility,” Raskin said. “And so instead, they want one, you know, unvetted government contractor to be doing oversight over federal contracts. It's ridiculous.”
It’s not just the lack of oversight. Republicans on Capitol Hill are now Musk’s biggest cheerleaders.
“Everybody sorta ran on the same stuff”
Republicans refute claims they’re laying down on the job. Instead, they argue today’s GOP is in lockstep with the Trump White House.
“What do you view as your guy's role in this Congress?” Raw Story asked Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ). “Is it oversight of the executive, or is it working in tandem because you all are so aligned?”
“I don't know of anybody here who ran away from the president in their campaign. You know what I mean?” the former Freedom Caucus chair told Raw Story. “So everybody sorta ran on the same stuff that included reducing spending, continuing tax cuts, planning for security, that inflation would be dealt with by reducing spending — you know, the whole thing.”
So, instead of passing new measures to bolster the Trump administration’s prerogatives, Republicans are sitting back and enjoying the rowdy show just down Pennsylvania Avenue.
“We're going to do those mandates. We view it as a voter mandate, which gives us a mandate,” Biggs said. “So we move, we work together.”
Besides made-for-TV flurries of executive action from Trump and Musk, there’s not that much working together going on. As each day passes, the threat of a government shutdown increases ahead of the current funding deadline, March 14.
Instead of conducting formal oversight on the administration — like the GOP conducted at the end of the Obama administration and throughout the Biden administration — many Republicans now say their job is to oversee taxpayer dollars. Thus, Republicans say they’re in lockstep with Trump, Musk and DOGE.
“The oversight role still continues, though,” Biggs said. “It's not a new idea to have an independent third party, you know, looking into something like this, so our oversight is to make sure that we know where the dollars are going, just like we've been trying to do for the last — ever since I got here.”
“Now Democrats, they say you guys are just puppets for Musk and Trump,” Raw Story pressed. “You all see it differently?”
“No, that's not true,” Biggs said. “That's kind of a talking point narrative that they're trying to build on, because they don't have jack squat on policy.”
Republicans remain light on policy themselves. That’s despite the new Supreme Court mandate — when it struck down the ‘Chevron doctrine’ last summer — that Congress get serious about writing legislation instead of leaning on federal agencies to think for Congress.
Don’t tell DOGE…
The day’s quickly approaching when Trump will run out of executive orders to sign, and he’ll need Congress to send him actual bills to sign into law.
Lawmakers are braced. Their jobs — or, at the very least, those of their staff — have already gotten noticeably harder since Chief Justice Roberts and the court’s conservatives upended the precedent set in the 1984 Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council decision.
“I haven't thought of it that way. I do think it's put an extra burden on us,” Sen. Lummis — the Wyoming Republican who used to be on the Freedom Caucus — said. “It ramps up our drafting. We're more detailed about our drafting because Chevron.”
It’s not just making drafting legislation more meticulous: it seems to be melding lawmakers from the president’s own party with the very federal agencies lawmakers are supposed to oversee.
“Just more hard work. And it is all specifically geared towards Chevron, but I can't really say that it has affected the relationship between the legislative and executive branch, yet,” Lummis said. “It might, but more the agency level than the White House level. You know, the agencies we work with.”
But soon, the agencies won’t be much assistance as this Congress will be required to stand on its own.
“The Supreme Court said, ‘Hey, you guys gotta do your job,’” Raw Story reminded Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX).
“I think we're early in trying to figure out how to mechanically put all that in place,” Roy told Raw Story at the Capitol. “Like, I think, honestly, a lot of what DOGE is doing and what Elon's doing, we've got to embrace and put in our own orbit in Congress.”
While Musk, Trump and many rank-and-file Republicans are promising some $2 trillion in federal budget cuts, Roy and a handful of other Republicans argue increased funding is needed now to save money in the long run.
Roy argues efforts to cut Congress’ own budget — legislative branch appropriations, to be precise — are misguided, because expertise is needed to upend the administrative state legislatively.
“Guys that are always wanting to slash and burn [legislative] branch approps, I’m like, ‘You got to have your own,’” Roy said. “You’ve got to understand in a post-Chevron world, we got to be able to do our jobs. We need to have, certainly, in some organized fashion — I'm not sure every office has to be beefed up — but our ability to be able to have overview and constraint.”
Roy says that’s where Republicans are rooting for Musk most.
Instead of the time it takes to investigate and then issue a formal report or to “have somebody come testify,” Roy believes the technology-driven Silicon Valley approach will leave a lasting imprint on on not just the executive branch but Congress itself.
“Look, with technology now, I mean, what Elon’s showing — whether you love him or you don’t — the ability to use algorithms and computers and AI to go pore over the government and expose all of the horse crap that we've all been seeing, that we have observed,” Roy said.
“Democrats say you guys are puppets of Musk and Trump,” Raw Story pressed. “But you guys don't see it that way?”
“No — at all, actually,” Roy said. “So far, what I've seen is the president empowering an individual to root through the crap and expose it…and I think this will now empower Congress in the future — both sides of the aisle — to be able to go forward and pore over all of this crap.”
“Because, essentially, when you do spending bills, you'll fill in some of the things that they're currently doing?” Raw Story asked.
“Correct,” Roy said. “But we're going to need to be able to use those same tools and have input and/or build out our own.”
The steady stream of complaints flowing from the left is mere white noise to congressional Republicans these days.
“I think the hyperbole coming from the Democrats is simply because they lost and all of their little pet programs that they've loved for years are going away,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-FL) told Raw Story. “That is fear-mongering. The same fear-mongering that had them ignore the reality of the southern border, and it is why they lost, not just the Senate, That's why they lost the White House.”
Republicans may have won in November, but Democrats say they’re already squandering their newfound populist appeal at the feet of unelected billionaires, like when Musk backed a government shutdown during Congress’ last funding fight in December.
“They have a chance to succeed on, like, big issues that they ran on, but if they're gonna do this nonsense, it'll all fall down on them,” Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA) told Raw Story earlier this winter after Democrats came to Republicans’ rescue and funded the government.
POT HED: MAGA Effect: “It's a different party, in so many ways”
The MAGA-mandate may be nebulous, but to card-carrying club members, part of their job is to dismantle American conservatism — or what became of it in recent neocon saturated decades — itself.
“Is part of the mandate also to upend the Republican Party of old?” Raw Story asked the House Judiciary chair.
“It just happens. It's a different party in so many ways,” Jordan told Raw Story. "Someone said this a few years ago, you know, 'We're no longer the wine and cheese party. We're a beer and blue jeans party.' And so we're much more, I think, a working-class, middle-class-focused party."
“I always say, we make the job too complicated. Job's pretty simple. We just tell the voters what you were gonna do when you ran for it. If you get elected, go do what you said. President Trump does that better than anyone,” Jordan said. “But when you have someone whose, like, singular purpose and focus is to identify that and say, ‘We need to stop this’ — that's a good thing.”
Democrats are still regrouping after their party’s stunning defeat in November, but they see one sliver of an opening — one many predict will only grow in the coming months — as they watch this, supposedly, populist president pal around with billionaires.
“He's good at taking care of people who can afford to join Mar-a-Lago, so that's, like, his crowd, whether it be a tax bill or whether it be for who he's bringing in the administration,” Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI) told Raw Story. “It's just very different than what we've been used to, where you bring in experts in areas. Instead, he just brings in fellow rich people.”
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