Ep. 1247: Why Does Congress Punt Its Powers?

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Why does Congress keep handing Trump its power?

The bigger question is, why has Congress continually handed the president its power?

I'll talk about that on this episode of the Brian McClainy hand show.

It's time to think locally and act locally.

Welcome to the Brian McClainy hand show.

Welcome back to the Brian McClainy hand show.

Glad to be back on the program.

Very glad to be here.

All right.

Wrap it up the week.

What is the discussion of Congress?

Bringing its responsibilities all the time, excuse me, to the president of the United States.

It does.

I mean, look, Congress sentenced the early 20th century.

Has a sighted that it's not going to be a roadblock to the presidency.

I say to the early 20th century because all of this process really began during the Wilson

administration and World War I.

Now there were times that Congress was handing over its powers to the president.

Before that, of course, during the War for Southern Independence, which is the proper

term for the war, Congress essentially punted a couple of times when it came to Lincoln.

But then after that, they generally tried to regain their constitutional power.

But by the 20th century, that was all over, particularly again during World War I.

I've mentioned on the show before that during World War I, there was a congressman that

proposed a bill that would have given the president virtual dictatorial power.

In fact, he jokingly said, here's what we're going to do.

We're going to pass a bill that authorizes the president to do anything he wants to do.

And Congress will just go along with it.

Because by World War I, you're seeing the modern warfare state with the president, the

imperial presidency being paramount.

During World War I, we had the creation of several government agencies that directed the

war, but not just the war, not just the military side, but also the domestic side.

And Congress, at that point, had decided it really wasn't going to stop any of it.

Now during the 1920s, it's often thought, well, Congress regained its power, had some

control over the United States government.

But that was all just a farce, because by the time you get to the new deal, and what Congress

was doing there, and we literally, at one point, they passed a rolled up newspaper, rather

than a bill, because they were waiting for the executive branch, Roosevelt, to tell them

what to pass.

Congress became an extension of the presidency.

And this is very much like early parliaments in England, where the parliament was the

extension of the monarchy.

The parliament really didn't offer much opposition at times, for example, Queen Elizabeth.

She worked through the parliament, but basically told the parliament what to do.

You only see the parliament become ascended in the 17th century, which leads, of course,

to the English Civil War, and the reduction of the powers of the king to symbolic status.

We don't have that in America, in fact, in the United States, we have a much more rigid

executive government than Britain could ever contemplate at this point.

We have an elected king, whereas they have a symbolic king.

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The parliament there, the legislative body has really all the power.

You can't say that in the United States, it's the exact opposite.

We have in America what we supposedly broke away from in the 18th century.

That's what we have, which is fascinating because this is exactly what Alexander Hamilton

said would happen in June of 1787.

He said, look, just skipper of the heartache and go right to it.

Of course, the British were able to, in their government, in their world, reduce the power

of the king from the 18th and 19th century forward.

The exact opposite happened in America.

So will there ever be a time when the president has his power reduced?

I don't know.

It's going to take Congress more importantly, I think the States, a lot of work to do it.

Congress isn't going to do it.

There's too much money and these people are too power-hungry and when I mean by that,

they just want to be at the foot of the throne.

They just want to be part of the monarchy in their own way.

They like the power.

On both sides, I mean, look, this is not Republican Democrat.

It's both.

I've mentioned this week that when you do this, though, what you create is a situation

where the left will come back into power at one point.

They're not going to be out of power forever and they will use that power to abuse the other

side.

In ways that they had never done before, I think that's an important takeaway from all

of this.

But there was a piece in the Washington Post by Liz Goodwin.

The title is, Why Congress Keeps Handing Trump It's Power.

It's a good question.

Why does it?

It's not a question mark, but it's an explanation.

But you could say this about any president, you could say, Why Congress Keeps Handing Obama

It's Power.

Why Congress Keeps Handing Biden It's Power?

Why Congress Keeps Handing Bush It's Power?

In fact, you could go back and say, Why Congress Keeps Handing Wilson It's Power, or Roosevelt

It's Power, or Truman, or Johnson, or Nixon, or Kennedy.

Let me why?

Ford, Carter, Reagan.

You could go back from essentially that 100 years ago to the Wilson administration, or

you could go back to the Lincoln administration and say, Why Congress Keeps Handing Lincoln

It's Power?

Why does it do it?

I've always threatened to write a book how Congress screwed up America.

I think the turning point for Congress really was the 1860s when you had naked executive

government at that point.

I mean, I think that's a real issue.

And this naked executive government would then there would be a retreat from that a little

bit in the 1870s and 80s.

But that naked executive government would become the norm for the United States as we got

into the early 20th century and Teddy Roosevelt.

We these people simply viewed the presidency and this is how they sold it as the main voice

of the people.

This is it.

And of course, what I mean by the main voice of the people, this was the extension of direct

democracy.

The president is the only person elected by all the people.

Now we know the president is not directly elected by the people.

He's elected by the states.

And this is clear if there's a situation where no one has a majority in the electoral

college where the Congress, the House of Representatives in particular votes by state to elect

the president.

So we know the president is elected by states, not by people.

But this is the game that's played.

Well, the people vote.

All the people vote.

They don't vote for all these congressmen.

At least, you know, the people of South Carolina don't vote for the senator from North Dakota.

That's because we have a federal republic in these states are represented there.

Now when you get the 70th amendment, that does change some things too.

See, you have to look at what's happening.

Congress punts because they don't want any responsibility.

Congress punts because they don't want any accountability.

If you place all this back on the president, then it doesn't matter if there are or

when things go bad, you can blame them and you become not really part of the problem.

Well, the president did this.

We didn't do it.

That's why Congress punts.

And again, they like executive government.

They like the power.

They're attracted to the monarchy and they really have no desire to pull any of that heat

back on themselves.

Now some do, but look at what happens and this piece is going to get into Rand Paul.

Look at what happens when a member of the same party will break with the administration.

How many times does Donald Trump run Rand Paul or Thomas Massey through the mud or eventually

Marjorie Taylor Greene or anybody that broke with his administration that was an R?

How many times has he gone out and used his bully pulpit to abuse these people?

Their reputations and you're talking about particularly in Paul and Massey to the most

conservative members of Congress, people that vote for the actual things that conservatives

say they want like limited government, lower spending, no foreign entanglements, strict

immigration.

Now Paul has come out and said some things about immigration that people would make you

think that he's not really on board with that.

But this is what the conservative side of America says they want.

They want lower spending, lower taxes.

They don't want foreign adventurism.

And so Paul is just basically voting for those things and Donald Trump is showing you he

doesn't really believe in any of that stuff because it goes against his agenda.

And the same thing can be said for Democrats that they break with the president.

Now we've never had in say the last 40 years of president that would call out members

of their own party like Obama wouldn't call out members of his own party.

And why do that is because the Democrats really don't break with each other very often.

But take for example Bernie Sanders, what do they do to him?

Well they rigged the nomination process so we couldn't get it.

So I mean there's that for the presidency and he wasn't going to get it.

They work behind the scenes.

They need cap each other behind the scenes.

Trump is just doing it openly.

So I mean you had before Kamala Harris was anointed as the heir apparent to Joe Biden.

You had Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the day before saying nobody supports Kamala Harris.

And then the next day, oh yeah, everybody supports Kamala Harris.

At least just silly.

It's all silly.

It's all theater.

It doesn't really matter.

What matters is the power and the executive branch.

And this is where George W. Bush told Glenn Beck years ago, look Beck, don't worry.

It doesn't matter who sits at this desk.

I don't run anything.

And I think that was a true statement.

Trump has changed that a little bit.

And this is what throws the swamp, the establishment into, you know, fits of rage because he does

try to direct things a little more, but they've worked against him consistently.

And you know, part of that is the establishment, not the Congress, but the establishment.

Reeking havoc.

Now Trump is on a hot mic the other day saying all his appointments are blocked.

The Democrats are blocking everything.

We can't get anything done.

So this piece actually gets into the fact that maybe the Democrats are standing up a little

bit, but they won't do it once the Democrats in office.

They're going to let everything go.

Well Republicans find a backbone and do something about it.

We know they did with, at least at one point, with Obama's appointments when it came to

Merrick Garland and the Supreme Court that just said, yeah, we're not going to listen to

that right now.

We don't want them on the bench.

Congress is prerogative.

They don't have to.

And of course Democrats complained about that.

But Congress can do that.

So let's get into the piece because again, it's an interesting piece.

Where does this come from?

Well, it comes from Republicans in the 1860 simply bending over and letting Lincoln get

his way all the time.

Early in March, Senators gathered to take a vote meant to remind President Donald Trump

of Congress's power just a few days before the president had launched a war against

Iran without seeking legislative approval.

Two Senators pushed forward a resolution that would have halted the fighting until Congress

officially authorized military action is prerogative under a 1973 law passed near the end

of the Vietnam War.

On his way to the Senate chamber, Senator Rand Paul, Republican and libertarian from

Kentucky, said founder James Madison once wrote that each branch of government's ambition

would counteract that of the others.

But I think Madison never imagined or envision a Congress with no ambition, Paul said.

This is a Congress without ambition.

This is a Congress without really a belief structure and defending legislative prerogative.

They just are a rubber stamp for whatever president tells them to do.

And again, this is not new.

Can you find a Congress?

I mean, I know they're having this poll quote from Paul and it's like, oh, this is all

about Trump now.

It's all about the Republicans.

Republicans are doing something no Congress has ever done for.

This is gaslighting like this is something new.

It's not.

You could have said the same thing about Obama or Biden.

If the Democrats were in power, if the party of the president's in power, they do whatever

the president wants them to do because they're locked step on a legislative agenda and they're

not going to contest that.

This is Nancy Pelosi after Obama launched wars without any congressional approval.

You know, the president doesn't need congressional approval.

No.

They don't need it.

This is Nancy Pelosi after the massive affordable care act quote unquote was passed saying,

of course, it's constitutional because we say it is they didn't even read it yet.

They don't know what's in it because they didn't write it lobbyists wrote it.

The Obama administration wrote it.

They all wrote it.

The Congress didn't write it.

They don't know what's in it.

Congress is ineffective.

This is why if you want to see where we stop all this, it has to be at the state level.

The states have to stand up to the central government.

It's never going to happen in Washington, DC.

And it's never going to happen in Washington, DC because Congress will always punt its responsibility.

They might show like they're tough here and there, but that's never going to be the case.

All walked onto the Senate floor and cast a loan GOP vote for the measure at which failed.

The vote was merely the latest capitulation of a GOP-controlled Congress that has subordinated

itself to the executive branch headed by Trump.

But again, good when it's making she's gaslighting you making you feel like this is new.

Republicans are new.

This is all new.

Nobody has ever done this before.

You could say this.

You could change the names of Trump to Obama and Republicans, the Democrats and the exact

same thing would be there.

We've got a Congress that has continually punted its responsibility over and over and over

again over a couple of hundred years.

She says while lawmakers once jellously guarded their constitutionally endowed power over

spending, trade and war, regularly checking the executive, Republicans on the 119th Congress

have cast themselves as help meets the president instead.

So that statement is just laughably stupid.

It's laughably a historical, particularly in the last hundred years.

Lawmakers have not jellously guarded their constitutionally endowed or what are we talking

about here?

They're constitutionally endowed.

They're endowed.

That's not something you say about powers of Congress that I don't know at least a good

win has on her mind, but it's not powers.

They're constitutionally delegated authority or enumerated authority or constitutionally

granted powers.

That would be the right phrase, but endowed and what is it?

That's just ridiculous.

It shows you again that these reporters really have no clue about what they're doing.

At all, at all.

Terror is dumb as the people in Congress.

I have no intention to get up getting in the way of President Trump and his administration,

House Speaker Mike Johnson said in late January, when asked about his procedural maneuvering

to prevent members from voting against the president's tariffs.

He has used the tariff power that he has very effectively.

Now, what tariff power that he has, again, President doesn't have tariff power.

That's a farce.

Congress can't delegate its responsibilities as somebody else, but this is part of the

regulatory state, the warfare state, whatever you want to call it.

Congress has been punting its responsibilities, really, since the Lincoln administration,

but it did ramp up during TR when they had the regulatory state there.

You look at the legislation passed by Congress at that point, which created some of the regulatory

agencies that we see that, or a mix of legislative executive and judicial powers, Congress

just delegated them away.

The entire budget process is backwards now.

Congress should set the budget and the president has no control over it, but that's not the

way it works.

The Office of Management and Budget presents a budget to Congress from the executive branch

and then Congress works off of that, usually agreeing to whatever the president wants

within certain parameters.

Congress doesn't come up with a budget, the president does.

Now, how does that work when the Congress controls the purse strings?

This is the exact opposite of how it was argued in Federalist 69 by Alexander Hamilton himself.

The president didn't have the power of the purse.

In fact, the entire founding generation argued this point when they were looking at the Constitution

and supporting its ratification.

Same thing with war.

The president does not have the power of the sword without congressional approval.

But Congress is just continually punted.

Again, since immediately after World War II, Harry Truman, Congress, punted there, Lyndon

Johnson, Dwight Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Congress, punted there.

You can say, well, in the clean hand, they passed the war power's resolution.

What does that do?

It unconstitutionally delegates power to the executive that the executive doesn't have.

For a limited amount of time, the Congress can't do that.

Now, if the United States is attacked, the president has always had the ability to repel

them to attack and maintain that status if we're attacked.

The Congress does have to get involved and people point back to the barberry war.

Again, they don't know what they're talking about.

They don't know what they are talking about because Americans are historically ignorant.

They're not even aware of things that happened just 20 years ago.

This piece by Lisa Goodwin is a nice example of that.

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Weeks later, the Supreme Court disagreed, issuing an opinion that struck down most of Trump's

sweeping tariffs as an infringement on Congress.

Well they also left them out.

You have other legislation you just can't use this legislation.

This legislating can be hard and take time and yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress

when some pressing problem arises.

But the deliberate nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design.

Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, a Trump appointee, reminded everyone in his opinion.

As we work with Congress to enact new tariffs, Trump said, I don't have to.

He later imposed new tariffs using a different authority.

But again, this is authority that Congress gave him by unconstitutionally punting its responsibilities.

But that didn't happen in the Trump administration.

It happened years before this.

It happened in previous Congresses, many of which were controlled by Democrats.

You see the dirt a little secret is beginning in the 1930s, Democrats controlled Congress

for 60 years.

You almost all of the statues that we're talking about that have given the president,

this kind of power, we're pastoring democratic controlled Congresses.

Republicans are simply just using the legislation that's on the books.

Now she has, she says here, qualifies her ridiculousness in the next paragraph.

Lawmakers of both parties have been seeking congressional power to the executive long before

Trump was elected, especially on matters of war and trade.

Congress is not officially declared worsens, World War II, and his past laws delegating

its trade power to the president in some circumstances.

Well, there you go.

But then why make the title all about Trump because the Washington Post knows what it's

doing?

Most people aren't going to get to that paragraph, and everything before that is going

to be critical of Trump.

But then there's a qualifying statement, well, you know, this really isn't just about

Trump or the Republicans.

It's about some Democrats too.

I mean, yeah, they've done some things.

A number of political factors, such as the growing role of big money donations, even

in local races, the organizational power of party activists and the excoriating exposures

of social media, often discourage legislators from separating themselves from their parties.

Well, I mean, that's true.

All of that is true.

But social media wasn't around in the 1970s or the 1960s.

You did have the mainstream media, and they could do things like this.

And look, Franklin Roosevelt was as much as a bully of anybody.

As anybody.

I mean, that man bullied everybody behind the scenes.

So did Lyndon Johnson.

That's why everyone got in line.

But Trump's second presidency has marked a major advance in the expansion of executive

power at the expense of the legislative branch.

No, it hasn't.

Trump is a symptom of the disease.

Well, I have said that Trump is transformational in this way.

He's nakedly doing it as a Republican.

The Democrats have done it for years.

They just have been a little more court or a little more coy about it.

Republicans have also done it, but they've always hidden behind, wow, we're going to follow

the Constitution.

Look, when George W. Bush was president, we had expanded executive war powers.

We had the tarp.

We had unconstitutional presidential directives bail out some other things.

Now Congress would work with him on this stuff eventually, but Bush was acting on his own.

So is Obama.

Obama said it.

I have a pen and a phone.

I can rule.

I can do whatever I want.

So she says in acceleration, the president has not been shy about pursuing now.

Trump has just basically said, here it is.

Here's the executive branch.

This is what everybody has done and I'm going to do it and just I'm not going to tell you

any.

I'm not going to lie to you and say we're going to follow some kind of rules that don't

really exist.

That's why he's transformational because he doesn't care anymore.

That is raise concerns for some politicians, especially those who have left office about

maintaining the balance of power seen as central to American democracy.

Central to American democracy, the balance of power, which haven't existed since World

War II.

I learned ninth grade civics.

You've got three equal branches of government said Fred Upton, the Republican from Michigan

who chaired the House Energy Committee from 2017 who left Congress in 2023, but right

now the Congress is not one of them.

They'd advocated everything to the White House, but again, this isn't, didn't happen during

Trump.

It didn't happen during Trump, the Trump administration at all.

We actually have four branches of government.

We have the three branches in Washington, then we have the states.

That's been gone a long time.

You want to talk about where government started going off the rails?

Well, the war in the 1860s, when the states really couldn't block much of anything from

that point forward, when the states offered an obstacle, the central government had to remain

in check, at least somewhat.

We could go back to the 18 teens and 20s and talk about the rise of nationalism, which

is what I'm doing actually in this class I'm recording right now from a Klanahann Academy.

But I mean, it certainly started there and the Virginia quids, the old Republicans were

calling them out.

At that point, we're done and they were right, but it would take some time.

Many Andrew Jackson began the process that accelerated under Lincoln and that accelerated

even further under people like TR and Wilson and the progressives of the 20th century.

Trump routinely dismisses the idea that Congress might exist as an obstacle to his will.

When the reporter asked him last year how he planned to rename the defense department

as the Department of War, given it takes an act of Congress to do so, the president brushed

off the concern.

We're just going to do it.

I'm sure Congress will go along.

He said, now, that statement is really important because Washington has been operating this

way for decades, if not well over a century, we're just going to do it and we'll sort it

out later.

That's not what a written constitution does.

We used to have real debates in Congress over the constitutionality of legislation.

We don't do that anymore.

We don't do that at all.

Now we have Congress passed whatever it wants to pass with the president directing all

of that.

Then the Supreme Court can sort it out.

Usually it just goes along with whatever these people do.

That's not a written constitution.

That's an unwritten model that the British follow.

In this case, as I said from the beginning, the president has more powers than the king

of Great Britain in the 18th century.

Certainly than the king of Great Britain now, we've got the very thing that the founding

generation said they didn't want in the 18th century.

Goodwin says, over the past year, Congress has allowed the executive branch to refuse

to spend or delay funds that legislators appropriated.

After all, agencies without consulting it and issue executive orders on matters that

previously would have been approached only via legislation, scandal-tainted presidential

nominees who might have failed to win approval and pass administrations have largely muscled

their way through tense confirmations as Trump let Republicans know he would take any

no votes as betrayals that could lead to primary challenges for rogue senators.

But again, all this isn't new.

Like we've had awful people appointed under Democrats like to Katanjee Brown-Jackson,

I mean, one of the worst appointments ever to the Supreme Court.

She's terrible, really not even qualified, but she's there.

Scandals?

I mean, come on.

I've been all kinds of with the Democrats and yet these people can Hillary Clinton.

Scandals?

Well, when the Secretary of State, come on.

Issued executive orders that would have been approached only via legislation, again, every

president has done this, including Biden and Obama, and where is the Washington Post criticizing

that?

Nowhere?

Where was Lisa Goodwin?

Then?

Nowhere?

So then again, you get to this point, well, Trump is bad.

Well, then she says, no Congress has given up his power quite like this one, but it's

a ability to do so, stems from the behavior of past Congresses.

Well, no one's like this one, false.

In fact, some of them were worse because they actually had some ability to block the

presidents and they didn't do it.

Lawmakers began legislating away their terror authorities, starting in the 1930s, who

wasn't power then, well, 1933 and Democrats.

They have frequently refused to hold votes authorizing wars in recent decades, like, I mean,

with Obama, which he mentions here, or, I don't know, Truman, Johnson, Kennedy,

Nixon, I mean, all those, Reagan, Obama, Biden, I mean, everyone, including when the

Obama administration asked them to authorize military action against the Islamic State.

Even, I mean, it's almost like, oh my gosh, even my hero Obama did some things wrong.

Starting by partisanship also has made passing bills difficult, tempting members of Congress

to lean on their presidents to accomplish their goals.

Members of Congress and both parties have been willing to give up their institutional

power to the executive branch because it's hard to legislate in Congress, said Molly

Reynolds, the Vice President and Director of Governance Studies at the Center Left Brookings

Institution, and the partisanship and polarization makes it hard for parties to get the things

that wants to get done, done.

This has created an opening for a president eager to expand his influence now.

Look, the partisanship was awful in previous Congresses.

I mean, if you go back in the 19th century, the partisanship is just as bad then as it

is now, but we didn't have the imperial state at that point, and we actually had Congresses

that worried about the Constitution until we get to, say, Jackson and Lincoln.

Trump issued 225 executive orders during his first year back in office several times more

than the 55 he signed in the first year of his first term, and far above the 77 president

Joe Biden signed in 2021.

Some of Trump's first executive orders and his second term were directives to effectively

eliminate federal agencies authorized by Congress.

Some of that was also overturned by executive orders and go back on that.

As Trump busied himself with an acting as agenda, Congress did little.

The legislature passed it and acted just 68 public laws in 2025.

Many of them repeals of Biden-era policies.

During the same time in Trump's first term, Congress passed it and acted in 96 laws.

Many Republicans have excused Trump's incursion in their territory, arguing Congress has become

too dysfunctional to tackle GOP priorities, such as lowering the ever-expanding national

debt.

Well, that's because that's not really the goal of the Republicans, I don't really

care about that.

The debt has continued to climb under Trump reaching more than 38.8 trillion according

to the Treasury Department.

Again, it's rich for people like Goodwin even mention this because they don't care.

If Obama was there, they wouldn't want to say anything about it, they don't care.

They've defended giving the president wide latitude to set both his and their agendas.

Johnson who emerged as a weakened speaker in a closely held House after a bitter internal

battle said after Trump was sworn in that parts of Congress's role would be was to look

through Trump's executive orders and decide which one should be passed into law.

One of the first bills, the House passed in 2026 to adjust that.

It codified Trump's executive order, allowing shower heads to have higher water flow rates.

If you want a nozzle that drizzles on your head, then go get one of those, said its author,

Representative Russell Frye, that should be your choice as a consumer.

Donald Lawmaker, Representative Jeff Van Drew, a close ally of the president, boasted

last year about his role in persuading Trump to sign not legislation, but an executive

order pausing wind energy.

We wrote the first party set of the order in an interview with the Conservative News Mass

Network, proud to be a part of it.

Even this Congress's signature achievement, the massive tax and immigration legislation

called the One Big Beautiful Bill, which became law in July, involved an unusual level of

involvement from the president, who served as something as an unofficial whip, pressing

House members who supported.

Again, this is historically ignorant because this kind of stuff has been going on for over

a century.

This is what the presidents have been doing going back into the progressive era.

In fact, you could argue that presidents were doing this long before that.

Lincoln was helping push legislation through Congress.

This is not new.

You could say the same thing potentially about Jefferson in the second term.

But I mean, this stuff isn't new.

Trump handed out free merchandise to fence sitting members, fielding their phone calls, and

promise executive actions to get their votes.

You know, it was supposed to be in three, four, five, six, or seven different bills, Trump

said at the signing ceremony for the sweeping law in July.

I said, let's do it in One Big Beautiful Bill in Congress did.

So, the peace goes on.

And I mean, I could spend, you know, 50 minutes on this thing, an hour on this piece because

we're talking about Congress punting its responsibilities.

The peace does say the president can get around this with the state of emergency, whatever

that means.

Well, we could have a state of emergency about anything.

There's no state of emergency power in the constitution.

So that's another issue.

We just make this stuff up as we go.

Well, there's a state of emergency.

Show me an article one section eight where there's a state of emergency power or article

two, the president, where there's a state of emergency power.

It's not there.

Congress has created it out of thin air.

Again, to punish responsibility, even that, but in the line, constitutionally, there

is a way of president can sidestep Congress and gain additional powers when there is a state

of national emergency.

There's a national emergency.

Again, whereas the national emergency power constitutionally is an incorrect statement.

She could just left that off.

You could say statutorily, there's a way.

Not constitutionally, statutorily, there's a way that this could happen.

But again, as that even constitutional, this term constitutional is thrown around when

people don't even know what that means.

It's just like the piece I talked about yesterday where this conservative commentator made

statements, bold statements that have no foundation in the constitution.

This is what people do because they understand Americans don't ever read the thing.

They don't even know what's in it.

They don't know anything about it.

And that's by design, you see, it's by design.

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So this is a, I mean, look, we've got a problem with the presidency.

And the piece concludes by talking about how some people are starting to push back, right?

Some Republican, some Democrats are starting to push back.

And to say we got, we got to do something here.

That's all partisanship for the Democrats because they won't push back if Democrats

in office.

They never do it.

They don't care.

This is just about politics for them.

And it's embarrassing, but that's the issue.

So again, I could talk about this thing for an hour.

But this piece is a nice example of what the mainstream media will do.

They gaslight you.

This is all about Trump.

Trump is doing all this, all that.

Oh, well, you mean there are examples of this stuff before, but it's still about Trump.

Trump, Trump, Trump.

Trump is a symptom of the disease.

No question about it.

You want to find where we've gone off the rails.

It's not Trump.

It's decades and decades before now.

And the only way, the only way to get some of this back is through state action, not congressional

action.

Congress will never do it.

This is why I said why Trump is transformational.

This is a Republican, nakedly saying, I don't need the Constitution.

The Democrats have been doing it for years.

They haven't been bold enough.

I mean, there's been statements like Obama.

I have a pen and a phone Biden.

I'm just going to do it anyways.

They've made statements about it.

But Trump has just said, forget it in the state of the union.

I'm just going to say I'm going to do all this stuff.

The Congress just goes along because we don't really have a Congress anymore.

This is where the states have to stand up to this stuff.

Are they going to be willing to do it?

When they do, they generally win.

So anyways, great, great talking points, great podcast fodder in this article, even if

it's really bad.

See you next week on the Brian McLean show.

See you then.