Congress learned some hard lessons about the limits of its power during the first year of the second Trump administration, when Republican leaders in both chambers largely declined to check a president unconstrained by law or custom.
President Trump barreled ahead with scant deference to the House and Senate. He abruptly changed the statutory name of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, summarily withheld funds from congressional priorities, claimed broad tariff power that the Constitution invests in Congress, and launched military attacks off South America without authorization from the legislative branch.
Now, with midterm elections that will decide control of Congress less than a year off and with lawmakers hearing from anxious constituents about high prices and economic distress, Congress must decide whether to try to assert itself more and reclaim some of the power it has ceded to the president, or to continue to accept a shrinking role and diminished status.
“The president would be better off if the Republican House pushed back more,” said Representative Don Bacon, a Nebraska Republican who has sometimes opposed Mr. Trump’s policies and approach. “I think his tariff policy would be better. I think it would be better on Ukraine. I think we could push him in a much better direction if he was open to it.”
“But,” added Mr. Bacon, who has opted not to seek re-election, “if you feel like you have a bunch of lackeys that are going to do whatever you say, then he doesn’t feel constrained.”
With both chambers controlled by Republicans loyal to the president, pushback from Capitol Hill has been scattershot and largely ineffective, and oversight virtually nonexistent. Even when some Republicans have been stirred to join Democrats in raising objections to the administration’s legally questionable actions, lawmakers have struggled to get the White House to back off or reverse course.
The president has the ability to move expeditiously; Congress, not so much.
“We are seeing some of the limits in the established ways that Congress operates to deal with this kind of president,” said Gillian Metzger, a constitutional law scholar at Columbia Law School and a former senior Justice Department official. “The question is: Will there be a will in Congress to assert and will they be allowed to assert?”
From the first days of his second term, the president has given Congress short shrift. He ignored a bipartisan law upheld by the Supreme Court that banned TikTok, even as he and his top allies set out to gut federal agencies operating under spending plans approved by lawmakers.
The year ended with the president continuing to authorize military strikes off the coast of Venezuela without congressional approval, with the vast majority of Republicans refusing to join bipartisan attempts in the Senate to limit Mr. Trump’s ability to do so. All the while, the president was demolishing the East Wing of the White House to make room for a ballroom that Congress had no say in planning or financing.
“He was doing so much stuff up front, whether it was tariffs, DOGE, you name it,” Mr. Bacon said, referring to the Department of Government Efficiency. “An activist president — they are going to have the advantage. You have 435 members of Congress. We are not going to be nearly as fast as the president.”
White House officials insist that Mr. Trump has operated within the law and has legitimately exercised the broad powers of his office. Top Republicans in the House and Senate reject portrayals of Congress as weakened, saying they had a successful year carrying out the president’s agenda, topped off by the extension of tax cuts that would have expired at the end of 2025 without congressional action.
“People who file taxes will see a lower liability because of what we did,” Senator John Thune, Republican of South Dakota and the majority leader, said as Congress wound down in December.
Yet the president largely dismissed the role of Congress, saying it really did not need to pass more laws after cramming much of the White House’s agenda into its sweeping tax and domestic policy bill. And the White House mostly ignored the legislative branch on matters great and small, as the Office of Management and Budget positioned itself as the final arbiter of federal spending, which for generations has been the chief instrument of congressional power.
“With this Republican majority in the Senate, Donald Trump has basically walked all over Congress,” said Senator Michael Bennet, a Colorado Democrat whose state has become a particular target of presidential ire because of the imprisonment of a former county clerk after her conviction for actions in pursuit of false election fraud claims.
Mr. Bennet and his fellow Colorado Democrat, Senator John Hickenlooper, blocked year-end Senate consideration of a package of spending bills in protest of the administration’s unilateral decision to dismantle a significant climate center in Boulder, Colo. The president this week vetoed a noncontroversial, bipartisan bill authorizing a water project in a Republican-dominated area of the state. And he and cabinet officials have threatened funding for a variety of congressionally approved projects around the country in a pattern that Mr. Bennet said both parties should resist.
“It is absolutely outrageous, and the Senate Republicans know it is outrageous too,” Mr. Bennet said. “The question for them is whether or not they will come to the view that if we end up rolling over for this kind of stuff, it is going to happen as one administration changes to the next.”
With less than a month remaining before the next government funding deadline, members of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees would like to advance more bills to the president’s desk. They see the opportunity to soften the impact of any funding lapse, but also to guard against more unilateral spending decisions by Mr. Trump once he signs legislation laying out the spending agenda. An attempt to override the Colorado veto could also be a test of whether lawmakers are willing to more directly challenge the president.
In the House, a handful of Republicans have seized on the discharge petition as a way to circumvent the leadership and try to pursue bills that diverge from the president’s agenda, notably one demanding the release of the investigative files in the case of the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Republican senators have so far stood firm against Mr. Trump’s demands to eliminate the Senate filibuster and end a Judiciary Committee practice that grants senators informal veto power over candidates for U.S. attorney and the federal bench in their states.
But Democrats see the courts — and the coming midterm elections — as the surest way to slow a president they say has exhibited no respect for laws and norms.
“At its core, Trump’s authoritarianism is enabled by his utter contempt for the law,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut, who has been investigating potential conflicts of interest tied to private donations to the Trump ballroom project. “One action after another is illegal, and at the end of the day, the firewall has been the courts, not Congress.”
Carl Hulse is the chief Washington correspondent for The Times, primarily writing about Congress and national political races and issues. He has nearly four decades of experience reporting in the nation’s capital.
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