Congress Has Lost Its Power Over Trump

If the nation’s Founders didn’t want to constrain the president’s power, they wouldn’t have put impeachment in the Constitution. “They gave us the tools to do the job,” Representative Adam Schiff declared yesterday in his closing argument in Donald Trump’s trial. The president’s camp, meanwhile, insists that the legislative branch still has several levers of power against Trump. The defense attorney Patrick Philbin argued last week, “Congress has numerous political tools it can use in battles with the executive branch—appropriations, legislation, nominations, and potentially in some circumstances even impeachment.”

But what’s happening in the Senate this week suggests the exact opposite: that most of the checks and balances Congress provided against the president’s power are effectively gone. Despite ample evidence of serious misconduct,