What Happens When a President Stops Obeying the Constitution?

From defying Congress to rewarding loyalists and ignoring constitutional limits, America is confronting a dangerous new era where the rule of law no longer restrains those in power…

Back when I was a kid in Lansing, Michigan, my father used to tell me that the difference between America and the places his Army buddies had fought through in Europe and Asia wasn’t the size of our buildings or the strength of our army.

It was, he said, that here a cop couldn’t kick in your door without a judge first deciding there was a good reason, a president couldn’t help himself to the treasury, and he can’t take a king’s gift or send soldiers overseas to kill people without the people’s representatives saying yes. Even the cop shows we watched on TV had police regularly being turned away from people’s doors for lack of a warrant.

Dad believed that with the uncomplicated faith of a man who’d watched what happened when those rules disappeared in other countries, and he passed that faith on to me as if it were the most ordinary thing in the world, which, for an American of his generation, it was.

I’ve been thinking about my Eisenhower Republican father a lot lately, because the thing he assumed could never happen in America is now happening here, openly, daily, and with a kind of swagger that suggests the people doing it don’t believe there will ever be a price to pay.

Consider what we learned just yesterday morning. The Justice Department announced the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate Donald Trump’s allies who claim they were unfairly targeted by the previous administration. It’s an unprecedented mechanism that lets the president pay his own supporters — or fund his own private army — out of a government agency he controls with taxpayer money, with no functional constraints on who he can give that money to.

Representative Jamie Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, called it plainly what it is, a political grievance fund Trump can use to pay off his friends, and the obvious beneficiaries are the roughly fifteen hundred people he already pardoned for storming the Capitol on January 6th.

The Fourteenth Amendment, written in the blood of the Civil War, says in Section 4 that this is blatantly illegal:

“[N]either the United States nor any State shall assume or pay any debt or obligation incurred in aid of insurrection or rebellion against the United States.”

The men who stormed the Capitol to stop the certification of a presidential election engaged in exactly the kind of insurrection that language was written to address — several were even convicted by juries for seditious conspiracy — and now Trump wants to write them checks that could be as much as $1 million per person.

This isn’t some obscure or gray area of the law or the Constitution: that’s the document telling us all “No” in language a child could understand, and the answer coming back from the Trump regime is a number chosen, with a wink, to evoke 1776.

It would be one thing if this were an isolated outrage, but it isn’t. Instead of the exception, this kind of criminal activity is now the norm: this is the most corrupt, lawless administration in American history and, so far, they’re getting away with almost all of it. For example:

— Article I of the Constitution gives the power to make war exclusively to Congress, not the president, and the War Powers Act that Congress passed over Richard Nixon’s veto in 1973 spells out the only exception, which is that a president may use force when the nation has been attacked or such an attack is imminent, and even then he must come to Congress within sixty days for permission to continue.

Iran represented no threat to the US, there was no attack or imminent attack, and yet Trump bombed the country anyway without even notifying, much less asking permission from, Congress. And now far more than 60 days have passed and he and the toadies in his regime are giving the middle finger to us, the Constitution, and the law.

— Trump’s also been bombing small boats in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific since September of 2025, killing well over a hundred people he’s never bothered to identify, charge, or even produce a shred of evidence against. This is a naked violation of both US laws against murder and is an explicit war crime under international law and treaties.

When the Senate unsuccessfully tried to rein him in, he posted on his failing, Nazi-infested social media sewer that the War Powers Act is “unconstitutional” — as if he’s ever read the Constitution — and that the five Republicans who voted to constrain him should never be elected to office again.

Human Rights Watch described these strikes flatly as a campaign of “extrajudicial executions” carried out “without any credible legal basis.” The worst of them, the September 2nd strike, became what military lawyers call a double-tap, because after the first missile left two men clinging to the burning wreckage for forty minutes, the order came down, according to the ACLU’s account of the reporting, to hit them again and finish them off.

Killing shipwrecked survivors is a war crime under treaties we wrote and signed, and the Pentagon’s own manual says so, but we did it anyway, and the men who ordered and carried it out went on television and bragged about it.

— Similarly, the Constitution forbids in two separate places, Article I and Article II, the acceptance of gifts from foreign governments without the consent of Congress, a provision the framers wrote because George Washington’s generation understood, having just thrown off a king, exactly how a foreign prince could buy an American official’s loyalty one favor at a time.

Trump accepted a four-hundred-million-dollar Boeing 747 from the royal family of Qatar, a flying palace destined for his presidential library, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner took a two-billion-dollar investment from a Saudi sovereign wealth fund run by Mohammed bin Salman within months of leaving his White House job.

When Congressman (and constitutional law professor) Jamie Raskin pointed out that the Constitution says no present of any kind whatever may be accepted from a foreign state without congressional permission, the White House press secretary called the very question ridiculous. She literally laughed at the law and the Constitution.

— The Fourth Amendment says no home shall be entered and no person seized except on a warrant issued by a judge after sworn testimony about a crime:

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Nonetheless, a leaked internal ICE memo, revealed by the Associated Press through a whistleblower, instructs agents that they may break down the doors of private homes on the strength of an “administrative warrant” ICE writes for itself, with no judge anywhere in the process.

This is precisely what the founding generation called a “general warrant” that the Fourth Amendment was written to forbid, and a Minnesota judge has already ruled that one such raid violated a man’s constitutional rights. They keep doing it anyway.

— The Impoundment Control Act of 1974 requires the president to spend the money Congress appropriates, and the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office has now found the administration in violation of the law at least six times. The GAO’s general counsel has testified in dozens of open investigations and wrote that the Constitution grants the president no unilateral authority to withhold funds Congress has commanded him to spend.

Ignoring it all, Trump is withholding money from disaster aid to Medicaid funds to states and laughing at the law.

— The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump himself signed in November and which passed the House with only one single dissenting vote, required the full release of the files by last December 19th and explicitly forbade withholding anything to spare a public figure embarrassment.

Trump’s Justice Department, though, released fewer than half of the records, then quietly went back and added new redactions to documents it had already posted. You don’t have to wonder very hard why a president whose name reportedly appears in those files more than thirty thousand times might want them buried.

I could keep going, and that’s the part that would have blown my father’s mind. There’s the Logan Act being violated by Kushner, there’s the Hatch Act being trampled by Hegseth campaigning in Kentucky, there’s the Take Care Clause of Article II that obliges a president to faithfully execute the laws rather than treat the ones he dislikes as suggestions.

Several ICE agents are accused of murdering Renee Goode and Alex Pretti in Minnesota, but the state has been unable to investigate and prosecute the case because Trump is hiding the evidence from them. That’s a felony reminiscent of the old Confederacy.

Pile them up and instead of a handful of unrelated scandals like during Nixon, we see a method, the same method Hannah Arendt described when she wrote about how authoritarian movements don’t merely break individual laws but work to destroy the very idea that law constrains power at all, so that eventually the only question anyone bothers to ask is what dear leader wants.

Germany and Japan were here before, in the last century, and we didn’t like how it ended up requiring us to sacrifice blood and treasure to restore democracy and the rule of law to Europe and Asia.

The deepest damage, however, isn’t to any single statute. It’s to the thing my father believed in, the global understanding that America was the country where the law applied even to the powerful, even to the president, especially to the president.

Every dictator and strongman on Earth is watching the most powerful office in the world demonstrate that constitutions can be treated like paper tigers, that war crimes carry no consequences, that a leader can pay his own mob and pocket a king’s airplane and the system simply absorbs it.

They’re taking notes, and the next time an American diplomat lectures a foreign despot about the rule of law that strongman is going to laugh out loud.

What chafes me the most is the hypocrisy, because I remember, and you do, too. When Barack Obama used prosecutorial discretion to shield DREAMers from deportation, Republicans fought it in court; Speaker Paul Ryan declared it a major victory in the fight to restore the separation of powers and warned that the president is not permitted to write laws, only Congress is.

When Obama delayed an Obamacare employer mandate, Jonathan Turley warned that if a president can suspend federal laws then the legislative process becomes a pretense, and the Heritage Foundation thundered about “lawlessness” and “dangerous precedents” that weaken our constitutional balance.

Those same voices, confronted today with a president paying off insurrectionists, taking foreign jets, ignoring six GAO impoundment findings, violating the Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments, breaking the law on war, engaging in insider trading, and defying a transparency law he signed himself, have gone silent or, worse, become his cheerleaders.

For Republicans, apparently the principle was never about principle. It was, instead, always about whose side you were on.

American democracy can’t survive this sort of assault for long; it has to be stopped. And Democrats can’t afford to repeat the paralysis of the first two years of the Biden administration, when Merrick Garland’s Justice Department moved with such deliberate caution on Trump’s crimes that the clock simply ran out.

Democratic members of Congress should be forming investigative working groups right now, today.

One for the boat killings, one for the emoluments, one for the impoundment defiance, one for the Epstein noncompliance, one for the warrantless raids, one for tearing down part of the White House, one for his insider stock trading, one for taking us to war illegally, etc., gathering the documents and the testimony and the timelines while memories are fresh and witnesses are reachable.

They should be holding public hearings on each of these issues now, in the open, not as a campaign promise but as the constitutional oversight that is literally their job, so that when power changes hands, as it always eventually does, there’s no eighteen-month ramp-up and no excuse for one.

You have a role in this too, and it isn’t a small one. Call your senators and representative through the Capitol switchboard at 202-224-3121 and tell them you want public hearings on these violations of the law and you want them now, not after the next election.

Make sure you’re registered and that everyone you know is registered at vote.org, because elections remain, as the law professors testifying about presidential power keep reminding us, the ultimate check on a lawless executive.

Track what your state legislature is doing at openstates.org, because the defense of constitutional government is being fought in statehouses too.

And if this piece said something you think other people need to hear, please share it, and support independent journalism at hartmannreport.com and elsewhere, because the work of holding power accountable has never depended on the powerful; it has always depended on ordinary citizens who refused to look away.

My father’s generation believed America was the country where the rules apply to everyone, and fought a brutal war to defend that ideal. Whether they were right is, finally, now up to you and me.

Louise’s Daily Song: “What Happens When a President Stops Obeying the Constitution?”

Comments on the Monday Daily Take:

What Happens If “They” Win?

America is a country that has sold its soul to imperialist capitalism, and has transmogrified Christianity into devil worship. The eternal class war from which we have fled has only followed us here. The enemy, as it turns out, is us. In our lucid moments, we display our best intentions, but those moments pass, and our fear and selfishness take over again.
~ Jeffrey Hobbs

Everyday we have more evidence of moral decay in the “ leadership” of this country. Everyday we agree we must fight this. Everyday people wonder “ How?” We better stop wondering and we better get going it’s already being accepted by some of the Democrats. If we can’t do anything else start locally.
~ Patricia Lane

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