As President Donald Trump looks to imprint his agenda despite a pileup of courtroom setbacks, he’s being urged to work more with his GOP friends in Congress.
Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency have slashed budgets and cut jobs across the federal government but have also been on the wrong side of judicial rulings saying that fired employees must be rehired, that DOGE’s shuttering of agencies is unconstitutional, and that the agency cannot even access information in some cases.
Getting those cuts enacted in legislation would give them considerable legal weight to survive court challenges.
“I was on the phone with the president for 30-45 minutes yesterday afternoon to try to convince him that the White House should support our efforts to do a rescission package,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) told the Washington Examiner.
“We can only deal with mandatory spending and reconciliation, and we need to do a rescission package, and we could start with some of the most egregious examples of spending porn and rescind that spending,” he added.
While Trump has been acting mostly on his own so far, he enjoys a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate, and some GOPers are eager to help the president press his advantage.
Kennedy said Trump is “very interested” in involving Congress, and the president himself confirmed that the following day, saying, “I think it’d be great.”
Kennedy’s plan involves what’s known as a rescissions package, which would fortify the DOGE cuts and require only a simple majority in both chambers in order to pass. That could help stem the tide of courtroom losses.
Other senators are on board too. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said rescission is “the one way to make DOGE cuts real,” while Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) says Musk is open to the idea.
It would also be tricky, however. Not everything can be passed through rescission, and an effort to cement cuts using that process during Trump’s first term failed.
Another complication for the White House is that the rescission process, through which the president can request that Congress rescind appropriated funds, is outlined in the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
High-ranking Trump administration officials such as Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought believe the Impoundment Control Act is unconstitutional and can be overturned in court. If so, they may not want to be seen endorsing rescissions before arguing that they’re unnecessary.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment from the Washington Examiner.
Trump, in his comments, went beyond the rescission idea to having Congress throw its weight behind his agenda more generally.
“We’re also going to be codifying a lot of the executive orders that we’ve done, which have been very popular,” the president said, mentioning a pending executive order banning sanctuary cities that he thinks Congress could also pass into law.
Getting the legislature involved may be necessary if Trump wants his agenda to last beyond his own term in office.
Southern border crossings, for example, are down 94% year over year since Trump took office, and last week the president gutted the Department of Education via executive action. But both of those moves stand to be unwound by a Democratic president if not codified into law.
One area in which congressional Republicans have been in lockstep with Trump is their posture toward federal judges blocking the president’s way. Trump and Musk have both called for judges to be impeached over their rulings, an idea that GOPers at the other side of Pennsylvania Avenue cheered.
“Activist judges with political agendas pose a significant threat to the rule of law, equal justice, and the separation of powers,” a spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) told the Washington Examiner earlier this month. “The speaker looks forward to working with the Judiciary Committee as they review all available options under the Constitution to address this urgent matter.”
While Trump doesn’t have the votes at the moment to impeach and remove individual judges from office, the House will begin judicial overreach hearings next week and lawmakers are eyeing legislation to limit the district judges’ ability to impose nationwide injunctions.
Not everyone is convinced that involving Congress will stop the flow of lawsuits and rulings going against Trump.
“You’re looking at judges who — a district court judge, yesterday — invoked Nazis to serve her ruling from the bench,” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) said. “These are wild-eyed partisans.”
Nonetheless, Hawley, a former state attorney general, said passing Trump’s agenda through Congress would be the “right procedural thing to do.”
Trump is also fighting the concept of birthright citizenship in court, which is generally understood to be contained within the text of the 14th Amendment. Rep. Cory Mills (R-FL) has introduced a bill aiming to close loopholes in the process, the Washington Examiner was first to report. Such an act, if passed, would go a long way toward solidifying Trump’s efforts on that topic.
Mills’s bill would add the statement, “For purposes of section 301(a), the term ‘subject to the jurisdiction thereof’ means, with respect to a person born in the United States, that the person was born to a parent who is, at the time of the person’s birth, a citizen of the United States or an alien who is a lawful permanent resident of the United States,” to the end of the Immigration and Nationality Act.
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The rescission process in particular may be tough to pull off because it hasn’t been used since the Clinton administration, though momentum is slowly building on Capitol Hill to dust off the statute and rekindle it for the first time this century.
“A lot of people at the White House maybe not truly understand how the rescission package works,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) told the Washington Examiner. “There’s a real opportunity for us to get strong cuts through the rescission, but we’ve just got to figure out how that all works for us, and get it over here and start using it.”
David Sivak contributed to this story