All posts tagged "Legislative Branch"

A former legal counsel to President Ronald Reagan says watching Donald Trump in action has changed his perspective of just how much power presidents should be allowed to wield.

In an opinion piece for The Washington Post, Alan Charles Raul, now a lecturer at Harvard Law School, wrote that he once supported "the 'unitary executive' theory — a legal concept that would allow the president to disregard the contours and safeguards that Congress prescribes for the executive branch to follow."

But, Raul admitted, "Unchecked presidential power is not what the Framers had in mind."...

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) admitted that an "imbalance" of powers between his legislative branch and President Donald Trump's executive branch could prompt Congress to take action on disruptive tariffs that have contributed to the weakening economy, according to a new report in Politico.

Johnson made the statement at an Axios "News Shapers" event in Washington, D.C., Wednesday.

“I think the executive has a broad array of authority that’s been recognized over the years” related to trade, Johnson said. “If it gets close to where the imbalance is there, then we would step in.”...

In a perfect world, Congress and the courts would keep President Donald Trump's executive branch in line by balancing out his portion of the country's power base. Absent their effectiveness, the financial markets may be the last line of defense to moderate Trump's behavior, according to new analysis in The Bulwark.

Writer Matt Johnson posited that even as these vital institutions cave in to Trump's demands, "one important check remains: There’s nothing Trump can do to bend global financial markets to his will."

As an example, Johnson wrote that Trump's tariffs and the resulting stock market chaos were somewhat quelled last week when Trump was "bullied into submission" by the bond market. Trump announced that he was backing off his trade war because people were "getting yippee," but a massive sell-off in U.S. bonds led a CNN analyst to call it a rare economic "red flag" that even Trump couldn't ignore....