Democrats eye ways to rein in the power of future presidents

Confident in their odds of flipping the House, Democrats are eyeing ways to curb the powers of the presidency.

The effort is not likely to result in any significant reforms while President Trump remains in office and controls the veto pen. But Democrats, who have long accused Trump of abusing his executive authority, want to send the message that the country needs robust new guardrails to ensure future presidents don’t follow Trump’s playbook. 

“This administration has revealed the holes in our checks and balances, and it’s very clear that power has swung way too far in the direction of the executive branch, and the abuses of norms point out that perhaps we need to codify some of these norms,” Rep. Suhas Subramanyam (D-Va.) said. 

“It baffles me that the president continues to openly defy Congress as well, and our recourse involves hoping that the executive branch agencies like the DOH [Department of Justice] will enforce some of our powers when it’s very clear that those agencies are now simply loyalists to the president, so there’s generally a lot we need to do to patch some of the holes in our system,” he added. 

The push is reminiscent of the effort at the end of Trump’s first term, when Democrats controlled the House gavels and were widely critical of his expansive view of presidential power — not least Trump’s efforts to use the office to overturn the results of his 2020 election defeat.

The violence of Jan. 6, 2021, led to Trump’s second impeachment and stirred a sense that his political career was over. Since voters reelected Trump to the White House in 2024, however, he has only been more aggressive in exerting executive powers, using the office to pardon people convicted of violent crimes, gut the federal workforce and prosecute perceived political enemies.

Those moves have infuriated Democrats and renewed the appetite within the party to move legislation designed to rein in the actions they deem to be abusive. Some see it as a Watergate moment, when Congress passed a number of laws designed to curb presidential power in the wake of former President Nixon’s ignominious fall.

“I think what we’ve learned with this Trump administration is they’ve pushed the envelope, gone beyond the envelope in so many ways … we should know that we need to significantly tighten that up and codify things in the law that we just had assumed, our previous Congresses had assumed, administrations wouldn’t try to do,” Rep. James Walkinshaw (D-Va.) said. 

One reform Democrats are targeting is increasing transparency around presidential pardon power. The issue had drawn renewed scrutiny after Trump had issued sweeping pardons to hundreds of people charged with crimes tied to the........

© The Hill