Donald Trump and the Incredible Shrinking Congress

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) questions the nominee for secretary of health, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., during a Senate Finance Committee confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday.
12:24 JST, February 3, 2025
Republican lawmakers spent the last two weeks deferring to President Donald Trump and signaling they are happy to cede power to the White House.
They fell in line behind his baggage-laden nominee for defense secretary. They barely protested his flip-flop on banning TikTok. They mostly shrugged off his firing of watchdogs without the legally required notifications to Congress and gushed about his freeze on federal funding even as they privately scrambled for clarity.
Now, their votes on two of Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks, Tulsi Gabbard and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., could either send a message that they will not always acquiesce to the president, or cement their fealty in the new administration’s early days. Trump’s announcement that he is imposing punishing tariffs on Mexico and Canada this week could also test Republicans, many of whom are free-traders who fear a hit to their states’ economies.
Plenty of Trump’s critics remain pessimistic about GOP lawmakers’ appetite for a showdown with the president. They say the past two weeks have demonstrated lawmakers’ reluctance to challenge Trump as he granted mass pardons for Jan. 6, 2021, rioters, pushed ahead with polarizing nominees for top government jobs and laid the groundwork to claim new authority over spending and weaken Congress’s power of the purse.
“There wasn’t much willingness in his first term to push back, and I would submit there’s less willingness today,” said Dave Trott, a former GOP congressman vocally opposed to Trump. “I can’t imagine a scenario where they would start to stand up to him.”
Congressional leaders have a long tradition of closely guarding their turf, rebuffing presidents who attempt to dictate legislative strategy or flout their advice. But House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), who owes his position almost entirely to the president, and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) have so far not taken that tack. Instead, Thune remained publicly stoic when Trump threatened to bypass his chamber by installing nominees via recess appointments, and Johnson removed a disfavored committee chair from his post – reportedly at Trump’s request.
Last week’s confirmation hearings raised the possibility of more defiance. Key Republican senators were openly skeptical of Kennedy, nominated for health and human services secretary, and Gabbard, picked for director of national intelligence, during questioning or voiced concerns afterward.
“I leave today’s hearing with more questions than answers,” said Sen. John Curtis (R-Utah), a swing vote, after Gabbard’s grilling on Thursday. “Some of her responses, and non-responses, created more confusion than clarity and only deepened my concerns about her judgment.”
Trump’s Cabinet picks can only afford to lose the support of three GOP senators if Democrats are uniformly opposed, and it’s not clear that Gabbard and Kennedy have the votes to advance out of the committees tasked with reviewing them. On the Intelligence Committee, Sen. Todd Young (R-Indiana) appeared frustrated with Gabbard’s refusal to say that Edward Snowden was a traitor to the country. Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who serves on the Finance Committee, pressed Kennedy on his vaccine skepticism and urged him to say there is no link between vaccines and autism.
Still, voting down one of Trump’s nominees would come with immense political blowback, and no GOP senator has yet said they plan to do so. Trump allies made an example of Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) in December after she wavered on supporting defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth, unleashing fury from the GOP base.
“It’s a very simple playbook – get Trump supporters back home to call their home-state senators,” said Mike Davis, a conservative activist and Trump ally. “It works. Exhibit A is Pete Hegseth.” He said his organization, the Article III Project, will use the same playbook against lawmakers wavering on Gabbard and Kennedy.
Last week’s hearings often showcased Senate Republicans’ alignment with Trump, despite the tough questioning from some key committee members. Intelligence Committee Chairman Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) – a defense hawk whose foreign policy views clash sharply with Gabbard’s – defended the nominee in his opening statements and said he would support her.
Republicans also gave a warm reception to another polarizing nominee, Kash Patel, whom Trump wants to lead the FBI. Patel has a long history of incendiary comments and has fanned the baseless conspiracy theory that the FBI was behind Trump supporters’ attack on the U.S. Capitol.
For some Republicans weighing how closely to align with Trump, the political calculus has changed since 2016. Back then, most Republican senators had outperformed Trump on the ballot that year and felt little debt to the political novice. This time, almost every incoming senator in a competitive race rode Trump’s coattails into office, and the party has been remade in his image.
“President Trump is our head coach,” the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, Lisa C. McClain (Michigan), said last week while brushing off questions about whether Trump was infringing on the powers of Congress. She defended the Trump administration’s memo abruptly pausing federal grants and loans, which sowed so much confusion that it was rescinded in two days.
Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), chair of the House Oversight Committee, also shrugged off concerns that Trump was overstepping his authority with the funding freeze and, just before that, the firing of inspectors general.
“At the end of the day, I think he’s got a mandate,” Comer said. “He’s got support from the overwhelming majority of the people in this conference to get spending under control.” He suggested that Trump is not undermining Congress’s appropriations but instead is just making sure they are not being wasted.
Trump and his nominee for budget chief, Russell Vought, have said the president should be able to use a technique called impoundment to reduce or eliminate spending regardless of what funding Congress has appropriated. The Impoundment Control Act of 1974, however, says the White House can only delay federal funds under certain conditions – and not just because the president disapproves of how the money is being spent, legal experts told The Washington Post.
Democrats say Trump’s actions on spending amount to a power grab. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), who caucuses with Democrats, said the freeze renders the congressional process around spending a mere “novelty.”
“Why should we have appropriations committees and go through all this so that the president can do whatever he wants with the appropriations?” King asked. “It’s an attack on people, because there’s millions of people across the country being impacted by this attack on the Constitution.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), one of the Republicans most willing to break with Trump, was also critical, calling the freeze “far too sweeping.”
But most of the pushback played out in private. Some Republicans described the funding freeze episode as an instance of the White House listening to Congress.
“As the White House got more and more questions, it started listening to perhaps a different way of approaching it,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-South Dakota) said, jokingly calling it an example of the Senate’s “advice and consent” role. “I was very happy to see them, perhaps, listening to some members who might have suggested there was a better way to do it.”
Many GOP members of Congress have been pleased with their access to Trump so far. The president met recently at Mar-a-Lago with lawmakers from across the party’s ideological spectrum, and he huddled just a few days into his second term with a trio of moderate Republican congressmen in districts the president lost. “It was fascinating that it was that fast,” one of the three, Rep. Don Bacon (R-Nebraska), told the National Review afterward.
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