JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
Over the last 100 days, President Trump and his allies have exercised control over everything from immigration and trade to education, science institutions and the federal workforce. Many of Trump's actions are a direct challenge to the courts and to Congress, the two branches of government designed to act as checks on presidential power. NPR political correspondents Mara Liasson and Susan Davis have been covering this power dynamic. They join me now. Hi to both of you.
SUSAN DAVIS, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: Hi there.
SUMMERS: Mara, if you could kick us off. I want to start here with just a very basic question. What is at stake with this push from President Trump and his allies to consolidate power within the executive branch?
LIASSON: What's at stake is our system of government. You know, the founders designed a system with three coequal branches. They believed in broadly distributed power, what we call checks and balances. They knew that they couldn't stop someone from being elected who they would have said had monarchical tendencies. They wouldn't have said authoritarian. But they did think that this broadly distributed power system could stop that person from doing a lot of damage if he was elected.
But now we're going to have a test of that because the judiciary, which is one of the coequal branches, cannot enforce its ruling. It depends on willing acceptance of its role as a coequal branch of government by the executive, and we are now in the midst of a kind of rolling escalation of confrontation between the executive and the judicial branch. And depending on how it comes out, we might end up with a system that has a vastly empowered executive and a kind of withered judicial and legislative branch.
SUMMERS: Sue, over to you. When Congress is controlled by the same party as the White House, as it is now, there's not generally much pushback on the president, so tell us what's different about this moment.
SUSAN DAVIS: Right. Like, part of this isn't a new story. Congress, over many decades, has been ceding power to the executive. Some scholars would argue that dates back as far as the New Deal. But no president has gone as far as Donald Trump to intrude on Congress' constitutional power to decide how taxpayer dollars are spent. This Elon Musk-led effort to cut spending has effectively shuttered agencies and institutions funded by Congress, and Republican lawmakers have, by and large, just gotten out of their way. This is Speaker Mike Johnson back in February, saying he supported what the president was doing.
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MIKE JOHNSON: It looks radical. It's not. I call it stewardship. I think they're doing right by the American taxpayer, and we support that principle.
SUSAN DAVIS: The speaker did acknowledge that a lot of these actions are going to be challenged in the courts, and they'll have to respect that.
SUMMERS: I'll just note, though, it's not just DOGE. The president is also trying to effectively legislate from the Oval Office through executive orders on practically everything, from immigration to election law.
SUSAN DAVIS: Right. Like, consider that in his first 100 days, Trump has issued around 139 executive actions. That's almost as much, Juana, as former President Biden issued in his entire four years in office. In that same 100-day time period, Congress has only passed five laws. It's the lowest number in decades. But, again, Trump is not the first president to make law. Recall, former President Biden tried to do the same thing with his student loan forgiveness program. That was struck down by the Supreme Court. But Trump is certainly acting as an accelerant on this practice.
SUMMERS: Well, Mara, if Republicans control the White House and Congress, why doesn't Trump just try to propose and pass legislation? - which is the way, as a former congressional reporter, the system was intended to work.
LIASSON: It was intended to work that way, but if you have an extremely small majority, as the Republicans do, that means you have to compromise, and that's hard. And when past presidents tried to do very big lifts and big, ambitious pieces of legislation, they had bigger majorities. But also, not passing a lot of things through legislation is - goes with the - President Trump's concept of executive power. He is the EO president, not the legislative president. And he gravitates towards things like immigration and foreign policy and trade, which were areas where presidents have a pretty free hand. They don't need the judicial branch or the executive branch to do what they want to do. But the other thing about executive orders is they are not permanent. What executive orders giveth, the executive orders of the next president can taketh away.
SUSAN DAVIS: And I also think Trump has benefited from a reality in which Congress has been incapable for years of passing legislation to solve tough issues. I think immigration's probably the best example of that. Former President Reagan was the last president to sign a comprehensive immigration bill into law. So when Congress is this dysfunctional, it just creates an opportunity for the president to act on those issues.
SUMMERS: I got to ask about the politics here. Republicans control the House by just a narrow two-seat margin, which I imagine must factor into the calculations on Capitol Hill.
SUSAN DAVIS: Always - I mean, the party in the White House almost always loses seats in the midterms. And I talked to Kevin Kosar about this. He's a congressional scholar with the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. And he spoke to what I think is a pretty commonly held view here in D.C. - that Republicans are likely operating within a two-year window.
KEVIN KOSAR: The amount of deference that legislators are showing is to some degree, like, we just have to do this to see if we can rack up as many wins as possible because those midterms are probably not going to go our way.
SUSAN DAVIS: The majority largely rises or falls on the popularity of the president. So there's really no ability for Republicans here to create any daylight with Trump, so they just have to go all-in.
SUMMERS: Mara, I'll let you have the last word. Was any of this a surprise to the voters who came out and voted for Trump based on promises to make - well - exactly the kind of changes that we're seeing him make right now?
LIASSON: Well, I'm sure to some people it has been a surprise. They thought his first priority would be to bring down prices. But remember, people were tired of a broken, gridlocked Congress. That's why Trump got elected. He was the change candidate, and voters wanted change. But what Sue's talking about - Congress abdicating its responsibilities - is so important here. I mean, Congress is the Article 1 branch of government. The founders put it first. They thought they - that Congress was the best branch to serve the idea of self-governance because Congress is closest to the public. They serve two-year terms.
SUMMERS: That is NPR's Mara Liasson and Susan Davis. Thanks to both of you.
SUSAN DAVIS: You're welcome.
LIASSON: You're welcome. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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