President Donald Trump is showing serious symptoms of early-onset lame-duckness in his second term as president.
His power in the Republican Party is diminishing just as Democrats are preparing to use their new majority control in Congress to bring some much needed oversight to the final two years of Trump's out-in-the-open corrupt regime.
In a White House devoted to the overreach of presidential authority, what comes next is so predictable. Trump and his lawyers are now trying to criminalize congressional oversight.
They will fail.
Republicans are circling the legal wagons against Democrats
Federal judges – some appointed by Trump – have repeatedly rejected his administration's attempts to abuse presidential authority on everything from election administration to vanity-driven construction projects.
And
those judges have demonstrated that they're not just annoyed by Trump's legal abuses. They're also interested in holding Trump's lawyers accountable. Trump's legal team should review the career wreckage that remains from lawyers who have paid heavy prices for helping him abuse the law in the past.
Still, Attorney General Todd Blanche spent so much time on television, threatening Democrats for promising oversight, that the White House felt compelled to put out a summary of his rants.
Remember, America's top prosecutor is Trump's former personal attorney and never stopped acting in that capacity. This is the guy who tried to set up a scheme to protect Trump and his family from IRS scrutiny that was so outrageous that even Republicans in Congress balked at it.
Trump's White House counsel, William Scharf, warned Rep. Robert Garcia, a California Democrat angling to chair the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform come January, in a Nov. 9 letter that he is "monitoring the abusive and capricious threats that are now proliferating from Democrat legislators."
Garcia's supposed crime? On election night, as the scale of the Democratic sweep of Congress was coming into sight, he posted this on social media: "LAWYER UP."
That's good advice. Scharf should have taken it. Instead, like so many lawyers who have wrecked their careers for Trump, he is charging forward and will own the ruin he runs to.
Remember: Scharf's boss made effective political use of the chant "Lock her up!" when it served his purposes. Karma always comes back around.
Remember when Republicans wanted to impeach everybody?
Even the scrubs are jumping off the bench from Trump's legal team.
Aaron Reitz, appointed by Trump as a U.S. attorney in Texas, sent Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Connecticut Democrat, a threatening Nov. 11 letter that he also posted on social media. What does a U.S. attorney in Texas have to do with a U.S. senator's intentions to bring oversight to the executive branch in Washington, DC? This is Reitz's first job as a prosecutor, so maybe he just doesn't know.
Blanche had no compelling answer at the ready when journalists asked him on Nov. 12 what Reitz was up to.
Blumenthal, the soon-to-be majority chair of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, wrote back to Reitz, ordering him to preserve all documents that went into drafting his draft threat.
That's how it should work. Threaten to criminalize oversight. Face the consequences.
Oversight exists for a reason. The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled time and again that Congress has the power to investigate the executive branch for legitimate legislative purposes.
Republicans, while holding control of Congress, used that power frequently to investigate then-President Joe Biden, his family and his Cabinet members. That included a failed impeachment of Alejandro Mayorkas, the secretary of Homeland Security, and attempts at impeaching Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Trump and Blanche and the rest are trying to delegitimize congressional oversight before it can get started. That sort of thing only happens when an administration has something to hide. Democrats in Congress are itching to dig into the many messes of Trump's second term.
Democrats do have to worry about mismanaging oversight duties
The economic shock of the espionage and sex scandal at Nvidia, a vital computer chip manufacturer, tops the list. But there are also questions about the Trump administration's handling of Venezuelan oil reserves, the donors behind Trump's gargantuan White House ballroom, and how the Department of Homeland Security ran and funded a massive deportation scheme.
That all presents a danger to Trump. And he's sending signals that he knows it.
There's danger here, too, for Democrats if they overreach on oversight. The AP Voter Poll showed that the American economy and concerns for our democracy were the two driving forces in the midterm elections.
That's going to require a delicate balancing act – making life more affordable while holding Trump accountable.
But the Democrats have an unlikely ally to help bring focus to all this – Trump's self-consoling social media tantrums.
In a flurry of Nov. 12 posts, Trump tried the I'm-rubber-you're-glue tactic of accusing Democrats of corruption, whining that his political foes "are at it again, illegally threatening Republicans with knowingly false accusations and charges."
This is a president who made the midterms all about himself. He demanded that voters act as if he were on the ballot. And that's exactly what they did, while delivering a rebuke to Trump so politically sweeping that it reverberated in red states across the nation.
That's a mandate for accountability. And Democrats in Congress now have a duty to act on it. Trump will try to bluster and bully his way through it all, with the help of lawyers who should also be held accountable for how they act on his behalf.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on Bluesky, @bychrisbrennan.bsky.social, and on X, @ByChrisBrennan. Sign up for his weekly newsletter, Translating Politics, here.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Of course Trump wants to criminalize congressional oversight | Opinion
