President Donald Trump is pushing the limits of his executive authority, setting or attempting to set new precedents in the way the chief executive conducts his business. But could the actions he’s taking now come back to bite Republicans when they are out of power?
What goes around Washington, D.C., usually comes around at some point. In 2013, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid eliminated the filibuster for presidential appointments and judicial nominees—except for those to the Supreme Court. Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell, the minority leader at the time, warned Democrats, “You’ll regret this, and you may regret it a lot sooner than you think.” After the GOP gained control of the Senate and White House, McConnell then capitalized on that precedent in 2017 and ended the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees, paving the way for three Trump appointees and cementing a conservative majority on the court.
Following Trump’s firing of Democratic commissioners on the Federal Trade Commission and the director of the National Security Agency, The Dispatch asked Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill whether the precedents being set by Trump could be ones that a future Democratic president would potentially follow. None said they wanted to pursue Trump’s path to affirming the power of the executive.
After all, Democratic presidents have also pushed the limit of executive authority, and Republicans have criticized them soundly for it. President Barack Obama instituted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protected from deportation certain undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children. President Joe Biden attempted to waive hundreds of billions of dollars in student loan debt, but the Supreme Court said the effort was illegal. Today, Democrats on Capitol Hill are promising to check Trump so that the next president cannot further expand executive power.
“We have to restore the constitutional order during this administration, so that that’s not an open question beyond this term,” Sen. Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin told The Dispatch. “And that means, as you’ve seen the cases that have been filed in court, most of them have come down on the side of respecting the Constitution.”
Commentators (including our own Jonah Goldberg) have warned that if Trump goes too far in exerting his control, then it will be easier for the next Democrat in the White House to justify similar actions, creating policies Republicans no doubt will disapprove of. Still, with fewer than 100 hundred days having passed since Trump’s second term began, the messaging campaign employed by Democrats against the president’s actions centers on promising a return to order, not tit-for-tat retribution. Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut argued that Trump’s often chaotic concentration of power will help his party retake control of the federal government.
“Democrats are ultimately going to win because people want us to be a nation of laws,” he said. “Donald Trump doesn’t respect the laws. He doesn’t think the laws apply to him. He’s also mean and spiteful. This country ultimately doesn’t want a mean and spiteful president who fires people for sport.”
As part of his campaign to fill the executive branch with loyalists dedicated to furthering his policy agenda, Trump has fired bureaucrats across several agencies. One example is the March removal of two Democratic FTC commissioners, who were told their “continued service on the FTC is inconsistent with my administration’s priorities.” Alvaro Bedoya and Rebecca Kelly Slaughter have sued, arguing their dismissals violate the precedent in Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the 1935 Supreme Court case that stemmed from President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s firing of an FTC commissioner on political grounds. That decision ensures that independent agency heads cannot be ousted for political reasons, and the Trump administration has indicated it will ultimately seek a Supreme Court decision rendering Humphrey’s Executor unconstitutional.
“He’s breaking the Constitution, and I don’t think anyone should follow that. I think what we should be doing is checking his unconstitutional actions,” Rep. Ro Khanna of California told The Dispatch.
Though Trump’s powers to fire commissioners on the FTC and other boards that perform quasi-legislative and quasi-judicial functions is more constrained, he has much more authority to fire the leaders of agencies over which he has direct control. Such was the case with his firing of Air Force Gen. Timothy Haugh from his positions as NSA director and commander of the U.S. Cyber Command, posts he took in February 2024 after Biden nominated him. The removal, which reportedly came after far-right activist Laura Loomer advocated for it, is within the bounds of the law. Nevertheless, Rep. Ami Bera of California said he did not believe a Democrat should replicate it.
“It may not be illegal, but Gen. Haugh was a patriotic American who’s been serving his role—very intelligent,” he told The Dispatch. “As someone on the Intelligence Committee, I think it hollows out our national security.”
Trump has also pushed the limits of his executive authority through several executive actions relating to issues such as impounding congressionally appropriated funds and refusing to automatically recognize children born on U.S. soil as American citizens, instances where significant legal obstacles exist. Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois said he would not want a Democrat to test how far he or she can go with executive authority in the way Trump has.
“You mean, do unconstitutional things like declare that birthright citizenship is not legal, even though it’s written in the Constitution? If you want to go that far, you certainly have a lot of controversy,” he said.
That’s not to say Democrats, when they retake the majority, wouldn’t attempt some of the tactics congressional Republicans seem poised to use. One of those is employing Senate Budget Committee Chairman Lindsey Graham’s authority to use the current policy baseline as a novel method of measuring the deficit impact in order to make the expiring provisions of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act permanent. While asking Sen. Cory Booker a question during the New Jersey Democrat’s 25-hour speech on the Senate floor weeks ago, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer described the GOP budget tactic as “going nuclear.” Schumer referenced McConnell’s 2013 warning to Democrats about the filibuster: “Does the senator remember that when this was done in the past, McConnell said they would regret it, and they’ll regret it sooner than they think?” Schumer said.
Murphy expressed openness to exploiting that precedent, along with others.
“I think there are a bunch of things Republicans are doing that will come back and bite them in the ass,” he told The Dispatch. “They are right now considering the nuclear option in the Senate.”
Still, Murphy, who has set himself up as an outspoken Democratic messenger in the second Trump term, would not countenance extending such an attitude to the White House.
“I wouldn’t recommend a Democratic candidate for president run to be a Democratic version of Donald Trump,” he said.
