<A hallmark of the second Trump presidency is the White House’s insatiable, gradually progressing power grab.

It has steadily crafted, through legal and illegal means, a once-unimaginably muscular presidency. In recent months, the administration has started to itch for more, jealously eyeing Congress’ greatest power and responsibility and coveting it for itself.

These long-laid plans started to come to fruition in late July, when congressional Republicans bowed to Trump’s will and signed off on a rescissions bill — a once anodyne mechanism through which Congress could reclaim funds that it had allocated for the executive branch to spend, but that had proved unnecessary. The White House and acquiescent Republican senators, this summer, weaponized this kind of legislative package as a filibuster-proof hack to strip out Democratic priorities from government spending packages after cynically securing the party’s legislators’ votes. The recently passed rescissions bill axed billions in public media funding and foreign aid.

Russ Vought, the public face of this newest power grab and a rare holdover from the first Trump administration, has led the charge from his post atop the Office of Management and Budget. Turning rescissions into a neat way to renege on bipartisan compromise — part of his mission to achieve a “more partisan appropriations process” — is just the beginning, to hear him tell it. This presidential intrusion into Congress’ key function — the “power of the purse” — is just a foot jammed in the door.

Vought has been threatening to wield a so-called “pocket rescission” that would do away with the need for invertebrate congressional Republican cooperation altogether. Under his theory of the case, President Trump can merely run out the clock on the fiscal year, waiting to use his limited power to request rescissions until 45 days or so before the end. The request would freeze the process, he claims, until the year rolls over and the unspent funds have lapsed. Trump, just by waiting until mid-August, could pinpoint the funds he doesn’t want spent — despite Congress having passed the appropriations — and theoretically use this bizarre timing trickery to zero them out himself.

“It’s a provision that has been rarely used, but it is there,” Vought said of pocket rescissions on CNN earlier this summer. “And we intend to use all of these tools.” (No doubt responding to statements such as these, the Government Accountability Office, a legislative branch watchdog agency, published an article reasserting, unequivocally, that pocket rescissions are illegal.)

As August creeps by, the window in which Vought would have to make good on this threat inches closer. He remains publicly cocky about the legality of the gambit — and with a right-wing supermajority controlling the Supreme Court, his threats are difficult to dismiss. But experts, tallying up the obstacles he’ll have to overcome in the text of the relevant laws, their purpose and Supreme Court precedent, remain skeptical that the bluster isn’t more in service of keeping congressional Republicans in line than an expression of actual confidence in such a far-fetched legal argument.

“Frankly, I don’t think he gets a single vote,” David Super, a professor of law and economics at Georgetown Law who has written extensively on rescissions, said of Vought’s odds at the Supreme Court.

Legal Minefield

One obstacle comes in the text of the statutes standing up many of the programs Trump and Vought would like to defund. For example, the act establishing the Head Start program — which provides education and nutrition services to low-income families, and which the Trump administration has targeted for cuts — says explicitly that the funds appropriated to the program must be spent, and how. For Trump to unilaterally impound that money would violate the law, and the laws establishing many programs like it.

Vought may try turning to the Impoundment Control Act (ICA) to wiggle out of that obligation (he has also dismissed that act as likely unconstitutional, as it contains presidential constraints that thwart his scheme). But the ICA says specifically that it cannot be read as “superseding any provision of law which requires the obligation of budget authority or the making of outlays thereunder.” If the ICA can be read in any way to trump the mandates of the Head Start Act, the ICA says, the Head Start Act wins.....>

<....“The Supreme Court has said they are textualists, and that works out badly for liberals in many settings — but this one is hard to win for the textualists when there’s no support in the text,” Super quipped.

Layer that atop the purpose of the ICA, which Congress passed to curtail presidential power in response to President Nixon’s illegal withholding of funds for programs he didn’t support. Soon after the law’s passage, the Supreme Court slapped down Nixon’s attempt to impound money Congress had allocated to states under the Clean Water Act; the entire amount Congress authorized, the Court ordered, must be released.

Made Their Bed

The legal obstacles are many, but this is an unusual Supreme Court with an unusual predilection for finding innovative ways to give the right what it wants. Still, some of the theories and doctrines developed within the right-wing legal world that the Court rubberstamped — and employed frequently, to conservatives’ delight, during the Biden administration — will make it additionally difficult to reverse engineer a Trump win on pocket rescissions.

The Court has been openly hostile to executive branch agencies exerting what was once thought to be their clear authority. In recent terms, the Roberts Court killed the Chevron doctrine, which gave agencies the ability to interpret ambiguous laws, and spun up “doctrines” including major questions and nondelegation, which require unusually explicit congressional directions in order for agencies to act.

The major questions theory, in particular, holds that you “shouldn’t find broad executive powers in obscure provisions of statutes, which is exactly what Vought is trying to do,” said Matthew Lawrence, a professor and administrative law expert at Emory Law.

Should Vought triumph, despite the steep odds, it’ll be less a power shift from legislature to executive, and more a power landslide. Lawrence pointed to an increased likelihood of shutdowns and breaching the debt ceiling. Members of Congress would never have any actual assurance that deals they struck are ironclad if the President could simply change his mind and snatch back the funding later.

Super cast his gaze back to the 1787 Constitutional Convention held in Philadelphia, where delegates decided that the best way to prevent the presidency from becoming a dictatorship was to put Congress in charge of the money.

“If the President can disregard appropriations bills and threaten members of Congress with defunding their states if they don’t vote for whatever he asks for, he’d have more power than the English kings had prior to the Revolution,” Super said.>

<Several Republican governors of states with GOP majorities in their respective legislatures are heeding President Donald Trump's call to redraw their congressional districts just five years after the last U.S. Census. However, at least one of those Republican trifecta states won't be joining them.

Politico reported Friday that New Hampshire Governor Kelly Ayotte (R) rejected Trump's push to squeeze more Republican seats out of deep-red states, even though she has (slim) Republican majorities in both chambers of the Granite State's legislature. She told Manchester, New Hampshire-based ABC affiliate WMUR: "The timing is off for this, because we are literally in the middle of the census period."

“And when I talk to people in New Hampshire ... it’s not on the top of their priority list," she added.

According to Ballotpedia, Republicans have 217 seats in the New Hampshire House of Representatives, compared to Democrats' 177 seats. And Republicans occupy 16 of New Hampshire's 24 state senate seats, meaning Ayotte could likely box out both of the state's Democrats with a new map if she chose. However, doing so would effectively be a political one-eighty from New Hampshire's current congressional makeup.

Even though New Hampshire has a Republican trifecta state government, its congressional delegation consists entirely of Democrats. Reps. Maggie Goodlander (D-N.H.) and Chris Pappas (D-N.H.) represent both of its U.S. House districts, and Sens. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) represent the Granite State in the U.S. Senate. While much of the state is rural, most of its residents are concentrated in reliably Democratic-leaning population centers like Manchester and Portsmouth in the 1st Congressional District, and Nashua and Keene in the 2nd Congressional District.

Texas was the first state to take Trump up on his challenge, using a special session that Governor Greg Abbott (R) initially called in order to help counties devastated by flooding to pass new maps that would likely result in five more Republican seats in the Lone Star State. Democratic lawmakers fled the state in order to deny Republicans a quorum, meaning they can't pass the new GOP-friendly maps out of the legislature. Abbott has vowed to call multiple special sessions in order to pull off the mid-decade redistricting effort.

Following Texas' effort, other Republican states have embarked on similar efforts. Lawmakers in Florida, Missouri, Nebraska and Ohio have already proposed drawing new maps, and Democratic-run states have promised to retaliate if Republicans make good on their plans. California Governor Gavin Newsom (D) has proposed a 2025 ballot measure that would allow California to redraw its House district boundaries ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, and New York Governor Kathy Hochul (D) has said that she intends to pursue amending the state's constitution to replace its independent redistricting commission in order to draw new maps by 2028. Illinois and Maryland legislators have also entertained drawing new maps in their states.>

1.c4 e5 2.Nc3 d6 3.g3 f5 4.Bg2 Nf6 5.d3 c6 6.Nf3 Be7 7.O-O O-O 8.b3 Qe8 9.e3 Kh8 10.Bb2 Rg8 11.c5 Nbd7 12.cxd6 Bxd6 13.d4 e4 14.Nd2 Bc7 15.Rc1 Nb6 16.Nc4 Be6 17.Ne5 Rd8 18.Qe2 Bxe5 19.dxe5 Ng4 20.Rcd1 Nd7 21.f3 exf3 22.Bxf3 Ngxe5 23.Bg2 Qe7 24.e4 fxe4 25.Qxe4 Qc5+ 26.Kh1 Nf6 27.Qh4 Nd3 28.Ne4 Nxe4 29.Bxe4 Nf2+ 30.Rxf2 Rxd1+ 31.Kg2 h5 32.Qf4 Rd4 33.Qe3 Rgd8 34.b4 Qe5 35.Rf8+ Rxf8 36.Bxd4 Qxe4+ 0-1>

<[Event "4th Harry Lyman Open"] [Site "Framingham Mass"]
[Date "2001.01.27"]
[Round "2"]
[White "Stripunsky, Alexander"]
[Black "Bournival, Braden"]
[Result "1-0"]
[ECO "E54"]

<[Event "First Boston Futurity"] [Site "Boston Mass"]
[Date "1981.05.01"]
[EventDate "1981"]
[Round "7"]
[Result "1-0"]
[White "Dracup, James"]
[Black "Webb, Roger"]
[ECO "A33"]
[WhiteElo "?"]
[BlackElo "?"]

<Donald Trump has almost certainly complained more about journalists than any of his predecessors have, maybe more than all of them combined. So when Trump deemed a query “the nastiest question” he’s ever gotten from a member of the press, it was notable.

The moment came in May, when CNBC’s Megan Cassella asked Trump about “TACO,” an acronym for “Trump always chickens out.” The phrase had gained popularity in the financial sector as a derisive shorthand for the president’s penchant for backing down from his tariff threats. During an otherwise routine Oval Office event, Trump sputtered angrily at Cassella, claiming that his shifting tariff timelines were “part of negotiations” and admonishing, “Don’t ever say what you said.”

Trump’s appetite for confrontation is being tested again this week, with the arrival of two of the most important self-imposed deadlines of his second term, related to the tariffs and the conflict in Ukraine. Both present fraught decisions for Trump, and they come at a time when he faces a confluence of crises. A president who, less than a year ago, staged a historic political comeback and moved to quickly conquer Washington and the world now confronts more obstacles than at any point since his inauguration. Some of his central campaign promises—that he would end the wars in Ukraine and Gaza and boost the economy—are in peril. And for the first time in his 200 days back in office, the White House has begun to worry about members of the president’s own party defying him.

Tomorrow, the clock runs out on the two-week window that Trump gave Russia to reach a cease-fire with Ukraine. The president has been upset by his inability to end the war. Without an agreement, he has said, he will impose sanctions on Russia. But doing so would represent the first time in his decade in politics that he has truly punished President Vladimir Putin. Trump likewise has grown exasperated with Israel’s prosecution of the war in the Gaza Strip, a conflict that could soon escalate; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyhu said today that his military plans to fully occupy the famine-plagued Strip.

The other deadline is Trump’s latest vow on tariffs, which go into effect today for 60 nations, with rates ranging from 10 to 41 percent. This time, Trump appeared to relish declaring that there would not be another TACO moment, writing on social media last night, “IT’S MIDNIGHT!!! BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN TARIFFS ARE NOW FLOWING INTO THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA!” Since the panic triggered by Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff announcement in April, Wall Street has learned to shrug off Trump’s scattershot statements. But the economy has shown new signs of weakness, with stubbornly high prices potentially set to rise again because of the tariffs and, most potently, a recent jobs report poor enough that Trump lashed out against the bureaucrat who compiled it; last week, he fired the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, claiming, without evidence, that the jobs numbers were bogus. That unprecedented act of petulance risks undermining Wall Street’s confidence in the economy and undercutting Trump’s campaign pledge to give the United States another economic “golden age.”

Those geopolitical and economic headwinds have been joined by forceful political ones. Since going out on August recess, Republican lawmakers have been heckled at town halls while trying to defend the president’s signature legislative accomplishment, the One Big Beautiful Bill. And some of those same Republicans, in a rare act of rebellion, have questioned Trump’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein matter, a scandal that the president, try as he may, simply has been unable to shake.

The mood in the White House has darkened in the past month, as the president’s challenges have grown deeper. The ongoing Russia-Ukraine war has become intensely frustrating for Trump, two White House officials and a close outside adviser told me. The president had truly believed that his relationship with Putin would bring about a quick end to the conflict. But instead, Putin has taken advantage of Trump’s deference to him and has openly defied the president—“embarrassed him,” one of the officials told me—by ignoring his calls for a cease-fire and ratcheting up his strikes on Ukrainian cities. Trump has sharply criticized his Russian counterpart in recent weeks as he’s mulled what to do....>