WASHINGTON — In a newly emboldened President Donald Trump, liberals sense the rise of a tyrant pushing all the boundaries of power at once and daring Congress, the courts and political critics to stand in his way at their own peril.
For the Trump faithful, he has finally been freed to be a truly forceful leader.
In short, the right and the left are seeing the president they always thought was there.
In recent weeks, Trump has thumbed his nose at Congress to try to build a border wall, purged the Department of Homeland Security to get a harder-line position on immigration, withdrawn legal objections to gutting Obamacare benefits, moved to dismantle a major federal agency and successfully pressured the Department of Justice to investigate perceived political enemies he said Wednesday are guilty of “treason” for having pursued a probe of his campaign’s ties to Russia.
It’s as if someone hit the play button on a domineering presidency that had been paused by special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation, a five-week government shutdown and the various distractions created by the president himself.
April 10, 201901:36
There’s nothing wrong with Trump using the powers granted to him by the Constitution or Congress’ cession of authority to the executive, Rachel Bovard, policy director at the Conservative Policy Institute, said.
“We’re seeing the logical conclusion of Congress giving the executive branch a lot of power,” she said in a phone conversation with NBC News during a break from training to get her concealed-carry permit in the District of Columbia. “Congress has plenty of authority to take their authority back and they haven’t. … They stomp their feet and scream about a tyrant.”
Conservatives thought President Barack Obama abused his powers, including when he created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which protected certain immigrants who were brought to the country as children from deportation. And they believed, as many liberals do now, that the president’s party in Congress was far too willing to let the executive run roughshod over the legislative branch.
In 2016, Trump’s rival, Hillary Clinton, promised to use executive authority to address a series of hot-button issues, including her proposal to end the so-called gun-show loophole, which cheered liberals who were frustrated by Congress’ ability to thwart parts of Obama’s agenda.
That’s not to say every action is equal in moral value or proportion. But the move of party taking precedence over institutional prerogative is part of a long-term trend that activists on the right and the left have seen as a means of enacting their favored policies.
That trend has combined with Trump’s penchant for dramatic demonstrations of power to leave little question that he’s testing the limits of what a president can do unilaterally.
Several states have sued him over his decision to take money appropriated for military construction projects — and from other accounts — and use it to build a wall that Congress denied funding for before voting to block his plan. Trump vetoed the latter bill and will force the courts…
