I have been writing these “back to school” stories about Congress coming off its August recess for years now. They catch people up on what the legislative branch’s top priorities are, and there’s always a laundry list of things to attend to. And I guess I could go through the motions and give you that information again.
I could say that government funding runs out at the end of the month and the two parties are nowhere near a resolution. I could talk about the looming health insurance price spike and whether Republicans will extend Affordable Care Act subsidies. I could talk about the expectation that Senate Republicans will change the rules to speed up confirmation of judges and administration appointees, even as some Republicans try to put up their own roadblocks on certain nominees. I could talk about Donald Trump’s crime bill that Republicans are sure to try to fast-track, and the House-Senate friction on doing another partisan mega-bill. I could even get into the weeds and talk about the defense authorization bill and a long-awaited bipartisan crackdown on pharmacy benefit managers and a House Republican bill trying to regulate college athletics.
But at this point, I think it would be a fruitless endeavor to operate as if the U.S. Congress is a primary or even peripheral engine for making policy in this country. I don’t want to bestow a cutesy nickname to trivialize the situation, but we just got through four weeks of, for lack of a better phrase, Authoritarian August. Federal troops are in one American city (albeit engaged in sanitation duty) and will soon be in others; federal agencies are being dismantled at the whim of the powerful; federal paramilitaries continue to kidnap people off the street, often people here legally, and disappear them into the carceral state; people who have criticized the president are being targeted for arrest or harassment or worse; a compliant Supreme Court blesses illegal administration activities on a routine basis; the firing of a railroad regulator for the offense of being a Democrat in the midst of a review of the largest consolidation of freight rail in U.S. history is a mere footnote amid the chaos.
Essays about precisely where we are on the road to fascism or authoritarianism or “competitive authoritarianism” are proliferating, and hard to refute. But the one that stuck with me came from Jonathan Bernstein, illustrating the real dichotomy at work in America today. Usually, a despot grows unpopular after years in power, but in this case, Trump is already unpopular amid his ascent to power. His latest approval numbers are at 37 percent, a low for this term; even the good numbers show him to be unpopular.
How can such an unlikable figure be so intimidating? How can the Wizard of Oz inspire obedience after the curtain has been pulled back, revealing his diminutive stature? As Bernstein explains, everybody with the ability to stop Trump is simply sleepwalking.
How can such an unlikable figure be so intimidating? How can the Wizard of Oz inspire obedience after the curtain has been pulled back?
When people tell Trump he can’t do what he wants, he pulls back. He gets mad and shouts about it and thinks he should be a dictator, but the means of fighting back are available and often successful. When markets fell in April after the Liberation Day tariffs, he took those tariffs off the table, and what has replaced them are more hype than substance. When Los Angeles kept up the protests of National Guard deployments, they were quietly confined to two federal buildings and then canceled. The law firms and higher-education institutions that fought back got far better consequences than those that collaborated. Trump is even hedging on the next stop on the National Guard blitzkrieg, Chicago, after sustained pushback from local officials.
The key element that has made Trump’s second term different from the first is that the pushback at the national level from the opposition party is at best pathetic and at worst nonexistent. Governors have found their voice, but the leadership in Washington is foundering, even as they are made irrelevant.
Trump’s latest prodding at the edges of democracy is a so-called “pocket rescission.” We’ve already seen Congress give in and allow a small amount of already appropriated spending to be rescinded, under a process whereby the president lists the rescissions and Congress has 45 days to agree. The great minds of Project 2025 have devised a new policy that the administration is eagerly implementing: If the rescission message is delivered within 45 days of the end of a budget year, Trump can just not spend the money no matter what Congress says.
This is illegal. The Government Accountability Office answered the question of whether pocket rescissions are allowable with one word: “No.” Congressional Republican appropriators have called them illegal. The very idea that you can stop spending money that Congress approved because you requested to rescind it too late in the year is facially absurd.
But Trump did it anyway, cutting $5 billion in foreign aid and daring anyone to stop him. And this is really just the beginning of sweeping powers claimed by this administration to dictate federal budgets entirely within the executive branch, the Congress and the first article of the Constitution be damned.
Which brings us to the Democrats, who are watching the congressional power of the purse be vaporized, and who have a leverage point in the form of a budget deal that they must lend votes to by the end of the month. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said he would block a budget deal if Republicans signed off on the first rescission package, on the grounds that Democrats can’t make a deal that would only be reversed in a partisan process later. Republicans and Trump have already said screw you, and passed Trump’s first rescission package. Now they’re canceling spending again. What will Schumer do?
Of course, this is about more than spending fights. The Democrats’ brightest young consultant stars have spent Authoritarian August telling Democrats not to talk about the military takeover of American cities, and to pivot back to affordability. Half the House Democratic caucus released an immigration grand bargain at a time when a roaming paramilitary force is unleashing terror on American streets. There is a critical lack of understanding of this moment, and even a lack of understanding of what the people who elected these representatives sent them to Washington to do.
I’ve read a month of stories about Democratic “strategies” to manage the shutdown. They range from cutting deals to not threatening to shut things down to not deciding whether to threaten to shut things down. “We are in uncharted territory,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told Punchbowl, a dim recognition of everything obvious in front of his face. “But I still believe it is in the best interest of our country to do as much as we can in a bipartisan way.”
I kind of give up. I took a lot of heat for writing that the coup had failed within a month of Inauguration Day. In a way, I was seeing the same pattern as Bernstein: that Trump pulls back when criticized, that the public had turned on him, and that populism without popularity is doomed. I read that again and found it just as true. What I didn’t account for was the complete uselessness of the opposition party that could turn those trends into successful pushback that retains some semblance of a democratic system—but hasn’t.
So upon their return, Democrats in Congress have a choice. They can blind themselves to everything happening in the government, on the streets they walk in the nation’s capital, in the White House parked just a mile or so away from the House and Senate chambers. Or they can open their eyes and recognize that pretending the same old politics can deliver the same old results is madness. Treating the government funding fight like a normal process would be insane. Not only has public sentiment shown the desire to fight the unpopular authoritarian, but marginally better policy has historically been the subsequent outcome of such fighting. Collaboration or silence would simply betray the country.