The following is a lightly edited transcript of the June 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump just exploded in fury at Jamie Raskin, calling for him to be expelled from Congress. Trump raged that if Democrats win the House, Raskin will lead the president’s impeachment. In saying this, Trump is accidentally admitting that he cares very much about the prospect of another impeachment. In fact, he’s meanwhile reportedly trying to get Republicans to expunge his two past impeachments, indicating how much they eat away at him.
All this hands Democrats a weapon. They should say, Mr. President, if we win the House, we absolutely will hold you accountable. And that raises a question: what can a Democratic House really do to hold Trump accountable anyway? What should it look like?
We’re talking about all of it with Andy Craig, a senior editor at The Unpopulist, who often thinks creatively on this topic. Andy, good to have you on.
Andy Craig: Good to be with you, Greg.
Sargent: So let’s start with Trump’s explosion at Congressman Jamie Raskin. It kind of came out of nowhere. He posted this:
“Jamie Raskin, a Loser in Life, who worked endlessly during my First Term to impeach me, will guaranteed be trying to do it again despite one of the most successful Presidencies in history.”
Trump then continues:
“EXPEL THE BUM. Congress can never be great with people like this who suffer massively from Trump Derangement Syndrome, casting their vote of HATE!”
Andy, there’s a lot more of that. What’s your reaction?
Craig: Well, it does show that it’s certainly one of his fixations, that he is thinking already about what will happen in the next Congress. And he’s not wrong that it’s very likely he will face another impeachment trial. I think, honestly, even though we’ve seen some reluctance from Hakeem Jeffries and from some Democrats to do another impeachment, I think the pressure will be too much, because the outrages are just too many and will continue to pile on. And this is one of the tools Congress has, and it does have an effect even if you don’t get to 67 votes in the Senate.
Sargent: Exactly. And so The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump and his allies are hatching a plan to get GOP lawmakers to vote on a resolution that somehow voids Trump’s impeachments, whatever the hell they think they mean by that. Trump said this to the Journal: “It should be done because I did nothing wrong.” So he’s saying on the record that he thinks his impeachments should be expunged.
But here’s the real kicker. Several GOP lawmakers tell the Journal that such a thing would have a tough time passing. Which means some Republicans in the House don’t want to vote to expunge Trump’s impeachments.
Craig: One of the more normal aspects of this midterm is that they’re always a referendum on the president, and this president is deeply underwater on his approval ratings. So they’re making their political calculus—the last thing they want to do is be dredging up January 6, on which he is still particularly unpopular, or going down that route, or just generally having to be more associated with him.
They want to be on the attack blasting Democrats for whatever they’re going to do. They don’t want to be defending Trump right now, given where the polls are at.
Sargent: So in a way, that’s why I think that in a sense Trump’s explosion of fury at Raskin actually reveals weakness and kind of hands Democrats a weapon for the midterms. It’s really a self-own. He’s admitting that he doesn’t want a Democratic House because he will face accountability. So Democrats can say, Trump is plainly afraid of a Democratic House because it will hold him accountable—he’s admitting it himself.
And, Andy, I think Democrats should say that. Even some Republicans don’t want to vote to protect Trump. And I guarantee you, independents who are already tilting overwhelmingly against Trump right now and hate corruption really want a check on Trump and really want him held accountable. What do you think?
Craig: Right. Well, that’s the campaign strategy decision for Democrats to make in terms of what’s going to maximize their chances in November. But on the merits, the fact is that the shyness away from talk of impeachment isn’t well justified. Actually, the polling numbers show it’s not unpopular. It’s not toxic. It’s not something independents and swing voters repel from.
We see a lot of sentiment, understandably, across the board, that people want more elite accountability. The idea that he should get off the hook—whether it’s Trump or whether it’s anybody else, people caught up in the Epstein files—there’s a mood in the air of that kind of thing, where Trump is not immune from this kind of backlash against the sense of elite impunity.
Sargent: I agree 100 percent. So let’s talk about what a Democratic House can actually do. Let’s put aside impeachment for now, although I do think Democrats should impeach Trump and many of his top officials.
If you look at oversight and investigations, a quick list would mean much more digging into the Epstein files, serious investigations into how Attorney General Todd Blanche is deciding to prosecute Trump’s critics and how Blanche oversaw the bogus settlement of Trump’s lawsuit against the IRS—which granted Trump IRS immunity—serious investigations into the Trump family’s crypto scams and their dealings abroad. That’s just a start. What do you want to see happen on the investigations front?
Craig: Well, absolutely. There’s so many—the endless litany of outrages in the second term has been so much more extreme in terms of it being a target-rich environment for things to go after. Certainly one thing I’m particularly interested in is the boat strikes campaign. The frankly murder that’s going on with that—and the commander of Southern Command essentially resigned in protest over this.
So I think there’s real digging that needs to be done there with Hegseth and what’s been going on in the military in terms of rationalizing how this is somehow legal, which it obviously isn’t.
Sargent: Andy, let me just jump in and say about that—you could subpoena Pete Hegseth. You could subpoena top defense officials. You could subpoena the ones who are resigning under protest—I think there’s at least one of them. You could bring them into Congress and question them all under oath. We’re learning every day in dribs and drabs new things about this campaign of murder on the high seas, basically.
And it looks to me like if you were to be able to just dig even a little bit, you’d find an extraordinary lack of any kind of real rationale at the core of this. In fact, you might even just find summary executions being carried out just because Trump says blow it up. Basically something as really kind of disgusting as that.
Craig: So that really gets to the important nuts-and-bolts problem of subpoenas and enforcing them and making them work. This is something Josh Chafetz has written about that I highly recommend people look into. So for years now—and we saw this in the first term—congressional subpoenas have tried to be enforced through civil litigation, going to the courts and saying, asking a federal district judge, will you please make this person show up because Congress subpoenaed them?
And that’s not how it should work. Congress is not dependent on the other branches, nor on the other mechanism, which is referral to the Department of Justice for prosecution, which is obviously a dead end also.
Congress really needs to lean into using other tools they have, including its inherent contempt power, where ultimately Congress can arrest somebody on its own say-so, and it’s been done before. Congress can impose financial penalties. Congress can also attach funding fights to this—we won’t fund literally Pete Hegseth’s own office staff, potentially, or the Executive Office of the President, the White House staff.
There are all kinds of tools that they need to use. But the problem with the litigation is it just drags on for years and years. And even if Congress ultimately wins, it never gets done before there’s been a new presidential election and a new administration comes in.
Sargent: Yeah. I just want to break up what you said there into two parts and explore each one, because they’re important. The first one is, how do you get a rogue administration to obey subpoenas? And you’re essentially saying Congress has got to maximize its own tools to do that. That’s especially true given that this would be up to this administration, up to Todd Blanche—essentially his Department of Justice—to decide whether to enforce subpoenas.
So you have to have Congress exercise something like an imperial power itself and really maximize what it can do to force these subpoenas to be honored, right?
Craig: Absolutely. Congress needs to remember that they are their own branch of government. They have coequal, as it’s often put, powers. And when Congress issues a subpoena to somebody, that doesn’t depend on the president agreeing. It doesn’t depend on a court agreeing. That is a binding order that has legal force.
And ultimately, they need to go after people’s bank accounts or even send the sergeant at arms out to haul in, potentially. Along with the other procedural tools they have, like potentially defunding people who aren’t complying with subpoenas.
Sargent: Well, that was the second thing you brought up, which is the act of defunding. I want to try to get at that a little bit more. You’re talking about Congress essentially really using as a hammer the ability to just essentially zap an office. In other words, Congress could essentially say—either to enforce a subpoena or for some other purpose—we’re not funding the White House personnel, we’re not funding this agency, we’re not funding that agency until you do A, B, and C. Correct?
Craig: Absolutely. This goes back to the deep fundamentals of our constitutional system in the English parliaments of the Middle Ages and stuff. The power of the purse is the ultimate power. And that’s why it’s vested in the legislature. So there are different ways you can structure it and kind of procedurally how you tackle it.
But if nothing else, these appropriations come up every year. They elapse. And Congress can attach conditions saying, if the secretary of defense—and that’s the title to use for him—is refusing to comply with a subpoena, or the White House chief of staff or whatever, then we’re just not going to pay their salary. We’re going to defund their staff. Or there are other tools—you can defund various programs. You have to be willing to kind of take hostages. This ain’t beanbag.
Sargent: A hundred percent. And so let me ask you this. Let’s say the corrupt prosecutions of Trump’s critics really went even further. They’re already absolutely lawless and terrible. But let’s say it kept going. You could theoretically see a Democratic Congress essentially saying, we’re not funding that U.S. Attorney’s office anymore. Isn’t that an actually valid tool?
Craig: Absolutely. That’s what it’s there for. We’re not going to have King Charles I ruling without Parliament and funding his own prosecution of critics and that kind of thing. And there are some appropriations where there are fights you’ll have to have about trying to claw it back because they’re standing appropriations, they automatically renew, that kind of thing.
But most things, including exactly that—the U.S. Attorney’s office that’s going after somebody, or anything like that, the whole DOJ—those are on the annual appropriations. And so they will expire if Congress doesn’t get its act together and pass something.
Sargent: So I want to try to home in on your big point enmeshed in all that, which is basically that this sort of act would, if in a sustained way carried out, be a way of restoring integrity to our constitutional system. It’s worth pointing out that Trump’s abuses are heavily, heavily dependent on Congress utterly checking out of the business of oversight and lawmaking and everything, really.
Republicans have neutered themselves, neutered the Congress, and that is part of the reason we’ve got this unchecked lawless presidency kind of running rampage everywhere.
And so if we did what you’re talking about, you’d really be restoring balance to the system in a fundamental way. It wouldn’t be that Congress is overreaching. It would be Congress is bringing balance back to the system. Can you talk about that?
Craig: Yes. This is the core Madisonian checks and balances. These are the powers Congress is supposed to have. And like so many things, this problem predates Trump. The imperial presidency has been gaining power and Congress has been becoming more dysfunctional and more passive and not being as assertive as it should be going back decades. But as with so many other things we see, this is Trump coming in and turning it up to 11.
And so we’ve created a presidency that is this kind of turnkey tyranny, where it can outrun what even the courts can keep up with. But on a fundamental level, the big-picture political accountability for a lawless executive branch can only come from Congress.
Sargent: OK, so let’s just imagine that Democrats win one or both chambers of Congress. It’s most likely that they’ll win the House and not the Senate, but it is possible that they’ll win both—or I guess it’s possible that they’ll win neither, but they probably will win one or both.
So what happens if they do something approaching your vision of this? Do we really just see this fundamental shift in how the government is essentially functioning? What would it look like in a day-to-day, week-to-week way? What would the American people be seeing?
Craig: Well, there are historical precedents, and the biggest one would be what happened when Andrew Johnson was president after Lincoln during Reconstruction. And Congress was able to act more aggressively because they had Republican supermajorities—the South was unrepresented.
So what you can do with simple majorities can sometimes be more modest. But even then, what they essentially did is Congress took over reining in the government. It passed laws instructing the Cabinet secretaries what to do. It passed laws against Johnson firing them, which is what got him impeached and within one vote of getting removed from office.
So you can have a system that—we’re not going to have a parliamentary system—it’s not going to look like the United Kingdom where the executive merges into the legislature. We do have an independently elected president. There are certain constitutional powers that the president has.
But Congress is the preeminent branch. Congress is the voice of the people. The president is not the sovereign tribune of the American people. Our elected representatives are the ones who have those powers. And so they can pass laws and use their various tools to pretty directly reduce, in some ways at least, the presidency to a much more constrained role, where there are legal guardrails on what the executive branch agencies, the Cabinet departments, the secretaries, the heads of these agencies are obligated to do. And to craft that in ways that it’s enforceable, both through the courts and by Congress following up with oversight.
Sargent: It would really be something else if Democrats would actually go through with that. And of course, for a whole bunch of reasons, they might not, or they might adopt something in between. That’s a topic for another pod.
But just to close out here, when Donald Trump explodes in fury because he might be held accountable by a Democratic Congress, it makes me wonder—why don’t Democrats right now go out there and talk the way you’re talking? Maybe not exactly saying that this will be an imperial Congress, but saying something along the lines of, This is an absolutely out-of-control chief executive and that is having an enormously damaging effect in this country and the whole world. And if you put us in charge of Congress, we will rebalance. We will hold this guy accountable. We’ll put guardrails on him. We’ll restore balance and sanity to this system. They should get their heads to this place and talk that way, right?
Craig: Yes. And one thing that matters is not just—you can have the political strategy arguments about how many votes will this get and what do the polls say. And I think there’s pretty solid evidence that this is a winning message. But also what it does is it amounts to a kind of pre-commitment. And it shows that if and when they win, that this is the public mandate they have.
And when you’re talking about impeachment in particular, even if you cannot get to a major supermajority in the Senate to convict, it’s a kind of censure with teeth. Do you want to be out there hammering these issues, exposing the wrongdoing, creating the historical record, and showing that you’re doing what you can?
Or are you going to just kind of roll over with a defeatist, Well, he’s not going to get removed from office anyway, so what’s the point? I think that’s entirely the wrong attitude, and it’s learning the wrong lessons from what happened in the last two impeachments.
Sargent: I could not agree more. Andy Craig, I really hope Democrats are listening to you on this. Anyway, folks, if you enjoyed this, check out Andy’s work over at the Unpopulist. He thinks about this stuff very creatively, very frequently. Andy, thanks so much for coming on.
Craig: Thanks.