Over the past several decades, the Supreme Court has slowly whittled down the power of Congress and, in large part thanks to President Donald Trump’s chaotic second term in office, has already managed to dethrone Congress’ role as the most powerful branch of government, argued legal scholar Duncan Hosie Tuesday.
“For now, the supernova of Donald Trump’s presidency has muted this systemic conflict in public view,” Hosie wrote in an analysis published Tuesday in The Atlantic.
“His second term – defined by galloping abuses of executive power buttressed by Trump v. United States – has played out against a Republican Congress and Republican Court aligned, if not enthralled, with him. But this alignment is likely temporary and contingent. Should a Democratic Congress return, the conflict will roar back into view.”
That conflict, Hosie argued, is the Supreme Court’s decades-long “power grab” to strip Congress of its ability to check the power of the executive branch, define rights for Americans, and even make laws — a “power grab” that has only accelerated during Trump’s second term. And, in large part to Trump’s unprecedented tenure in the White House, the “power grab” is going largely unnoticed, Hosie wrote.
“The short-term convergence of the branches should not obscure the larger transformation: Congress is no longer the first branch of government,” Hosie wrote. “The same gale-force winds of polarization that split Congress into warring camps has also produced a Republican-appointee-dominated Court systematically constraining congressional power while expanding its own.”
The threat of the Supreme Court’s ongoing “power grab” was so dire, Hosie warned, that it could very well bring about an end to the United States’ “constitutional democracy.”
“When the Court claims exclusive authority over constitutional meaning while systematically weakening the federal institution most responsive to the people, it does not preserve the constitutional order,” Hosie wrote. “It ends it.”
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