Oddly enough, Republican lawmakers seem fine with it.

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What it would mean in practice, though, is more troubling: Trump could unilaterally zero out any program he doesn’t like, or whose recipient has angered him, regardless of Congress’s instructions.

Based on comments the candidate and his aides have made recently, Trump’s targets for budgetary nuking include clean-energy subsidies, international aid programs and funding for the World Health Organization. He told Fox News last week that he might cut the entire Education Department, Interior Department and “the environmental agencies,” too.

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Given Trump’s attacks on the safety net last time he was president, it also would not be surprising if he tried to unilaterally chop funding for other programs, such as Medicaid or nutritional assistance for babies and pregnant women in low-income households. Nor would Trump shock anyone if he were to use this power to exact vengeance, as when he threatened to withhold lifesaving pandemic assistance unless “ungrateful” governors groveled before him.

To be clear: This would all be illegal.

Trump has tried withholding congressionally appropriated funds before. Remember when he withheld aid to Ukraine because he wanted President Volodymyr Zelensky to do him a “favor” (provide incriminating evidence about the Biden family)? That was an illegal impoundment, the Government Accountability Office determined.

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Former president Richard M. Nixon also (unsuccessfully) tried to impound spending, many times. Like Trump, Nixon believed he had the power to reshape policy and funding decisions — congressional statutes and constitutional checks and balances be damned.

Nixon’s impoundment measures were challenged in federal court. Every time courts ruled on the merits, they decided against him, according to Georgetown University law professor David Super. The best-known of those cases — Train v. City of New York, filed after Nixon refused to spend Clean Water Act money on water and sewer systems — made it to the Supreme Court. Every justice agreed that the president’s personal policy preferences could not override appropriations mandated by Congress.

Trump says he has a plan for getting around these inconvenient precedents: It involves convincing Congress to roll back a 1974 law known as the........

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