Haha, Right: As If Giving the President Near-Limitless Power Over Spending Would Ever Come Back to Bite Republicans in the Ass

By House Speaker Mike Johnson

Photo by Andrew Harnik.

Of all the ways that Trump is reshaping the government, surely the most consequential is shifting the power of the purse to the executive branch. DOGE is cancelling spending approved by Congress. Trump’s lawyers are in court asserting broad power over spending. The White House has expanded the concept of an “unusual or extraordinary threat” to take total control of tariff policy, even though Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution gives that power to Congress.

The Republican Congress — led by me — has accepted and even cheered this shift in authority. We’ve championed it as a necessary measure to rein in spending. And already, two things are clear:

1. We’ve handed the president a powerful tool to dictate this country’s finances;

2. There is no way that tool could ever be used in the future to make Republicans deeply regret our actions.

Both points are indisputable, right? I mean: We have basically forfeited spending to the executive branch — even the budget resolution that Congress is working on right now is functionally a suggestion that the president can take or leave. That is indisputably a lot of power. And equally indisputable, I think, is the notion that there is no way that power could ever, in any conceivable universe, be wielded against Republican interests. There’s just no chance. We will never find ourselves saying “Oh no, we opened Pandora’s box.” Never. Unimaginable. An absurd and ridiculous fantasy.

Seriously, how would that happen? Would there be some left-wing president — someone like AOC or Chris Murphy — who gets into the White House and then uses the president’s vast spending authority to increase spending? That sounds unbelievably far-fetched. First of all: A Democrat would have to win, which only happens about half of the time. Second: They’d have to see the president’s vast powers as a shortcut to enacting their policy priorities. What are the odds of all two of those things happening? I just described a ridiculous, two-step Rube Goldberg device that could really only work in theory. It feels silly to even entertain this notion — I’m only mentioning it as a thought experiment to show how absurd this all is. I mean, come on: A Democrat winning the White House and succumbing to pressure from progressives to use the powers that we gift-wrapped and laid at their doorstep? LMSOTHAO! (Laughing my Speaker of the House ass off)

Consider: We’ve given the president the power to cancel spending, not to create new spending. So, how would this hypothetical Bernie Sanders-type figure twist the president’s powers for progressive ends? By running the exact playbook that we’re running now, only in reverse? I’d like to see that. I’d like to see them create a mirror-image DOGE to hire government workers and create new programs. And then declare some emergency — like a “climate emergency”, to pull a ridiculous hypothetical out of thin air — to rationalize spending. And then dare the courts to reverse the rulings that they issued only a few years before. That’s so absurd, I feel like I just smoked a marijuana cigarette. We’re in the land of pink elephants and tap dancing leprechauns here — I feel like Jim Henson on a megadose of ayahuasca wouldn’t dream up anything as ridiculous as what I’m talking about.

And how would the politics of this theorized turnabout work? Would Trump’s flogging of the constitution be so fresh in the memory that even liberals who would normally stand up for the separation of powers be so pissed off and/or marginalized that they’d let the president do what she wanted? Would they consider drastic measures to reshape the courts if conservative jurists curtailed the exact powers that they recently granted to Trump? Would there be a broad sense that all bets are off, and that actually, Democrats need to go absolutely fucking berzerk with the spending in anticipation of money getting clawed back by a future Republican president? We can confidently say: No, none of that will happen. Everything I just described is absurd. Theoretical physics posits endless parallel universes, but we know for sure that in none of those universes will the dynamic I just described come to pass.

Republicans will absolutely, positively, never, ever find ourselves saying: “My God, how could we have been so short-sighted? This is an utter disaster — the president has turned us into Scandinavia with the stroke of a pen. Even when we eventually win back the White House, we’ll have to take the political hit of yanking back that spending — what in seven hells were we thinking? I guess none of us really wanted to stand up to Trump; we wanted to be good soldiers and not get in the way of the MAGA revolution, or to look like we favored ‘government waste’. Plus, we kind of figured that the courts would bail us out. But they didn’t, and now we’re hyper-fucked…God, how could we not see this coming? This is like if the Titanic spotted the iceberg before it left England, but then hit it anyway. We must be the most dimwitted bunch of half-tards to ever drool on a congressional seat. I feel like I just lost a game of tic-tak-toe to a box turtle — the Germans are going to need to invent a new compound word to describe our once-in-a-century mix of idiocy, short-sightedness, and karmic suffering brought on by cowardice. ‘Dumkurschlappheit’ — that’ll be it. We are a total bunch of dumkurschlappheits.”

That is something that we know for sure we will never, ever find ourselves saying.

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