Congress and the courts aren’t going to rescue us—but the public just might.
Congress has been so neutered during Trump’s kleptocratic presidency that the rare instances when it manages to pass any big, vaguely bipartisan legislation ought to be cause for celebration. There’s something almost quaint about Congress using its constitutional powers.
Last month, it briefly looked as if that’s exactly what was happening with the housing bill titled the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act. Proponents and commentators described the legislation as the most important housing bill in a generation. It promised to expand incentives and government subsidies to build affordable housing, cut back regulations that both parties agree stymie development, and place limits on the ability of large corporations to buy up single family residences to put upward pressure on the rental market. All of this was, or should have been, low-hanging fruit. In an era in which more than half of voters under the age of 30 say their biggest concern is housing affordability and in which more than half of all Americans say that buying a house in 2026 is out of reach for them, there are no political downsides for legislators to vote in favor of moderate housing reforms.
On June 22, the Senate overwhelmingly passed the bill. The next day, the House did too in a 358–32 vote. The legislation headed off to the White House for Trump to sign—and that’s, not surprisingly, where things went off the rails.
After hyping a signing ceremony scheduled for June 24, Trump suddenly took to social media to announce that he wouldn’t sign the bill until Congress passed his voter suppression legislation, the SAVE America Act—even though Republican Senate leadership has told Trump it doesn’t have the votes to pass it. The housing bill seems to have attracted Trump’s scorn because it is cosponsored by Senator Elizabeth Warren. It was, Trump stated, the “Elizabeth Pocahontas Warren centric housing bill” and was only of “minor importance.”
GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson has repeatedly asserted that Trump won’t veto the bill, and given the widespread support for the legislation in both chambers of Congress, the veto would almost certainly be overturned. But that hasn’t stopped Trump from going on the attack. The housing legislation, he said on June 29, was a “yawn.” By contrast, his voter suppression legislation was vital to the national interest and failure to pass it constituted a “national emergency.”
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Trump has been talking a lot about “national emergencies” as they relate to the elections. And as ex–House majority leader Richard Gephardt and ex-senator Timothy Wirth wrote in this publication, that’s likely no accident: Declaring a national emergency could give Trump access to a tool kit of secretive presidential powers originally designed to ensure continuity of government in the event of a catastrophic nuclear attack but which Trump could conceivably use to undermine elections that his party is on track to lose in November.
In normal times, one might hope—and even expect—the Supreme Court to swat down such an unprecedented power grab. But almost every time the Roberts court has had the opportunity to block Trump’s vision of an unbound executive, it has instead allowed this most megalomaniacal of presidents to trash the country’s democratic infrastructure, right down to declaring that he can’t be prosecuted for anything he does in an official capacity.
To be sure, earlier this week. the court did muster the collective courage to vote down, 6–3, Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship via executive order. But given the 14th Amendment’s unambiguous language about who qualifies for citizenship, any other decision would have been pretty much inconceivable even for this court. Yet even in this easiest-of-easy cases, which should have resulted in a 9-0 ruling against the administration, three of the six justices somehow found ways to contort themselves into agreeing with the administration’s legal mumbo-jumbo on this. And a fourth, Brett Kavanaugh, ultimately came down against Trump but not before concluding that he was doing so because the executive order violated specific federal laws rather than because it stomped on a constitutional amendment. In other words, under this court, Trump came disconcertingly close to rewriting a part of the Constitution via social-media tantrums and poorly written executive orders.
And while the court majority slapped Trump on the wrist for his cavalier disrespect for the 14th Amendment, in two other blockbuster decisions this week, it massively expanded presidential power: The first gave Trump a green light to fire independent regulators from supposedly independent regulatory agencies and institutions except for the Federal Reserve. That means that the Election Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Securities and Exchange Commission are now subject to absolute political control. The implications for how elections are run, how broadcasting rights are distributed, and how markets are or aren’t manipulated are stark. Trump and his henchmen can now rig the game, be the game political or economic, with little to no risk of being held accountable by regulators and with the Supreme Court backing them up.
The second overturned limits on how much money political parties could funnel to individual candidates’ campaigns, thus allowing pay-to-play donors to give huge amounts of money to parties that could then be laundered toward assisting individual politicians. The decision renders campaign contribution limits largely meaningless, because while donors still can’t give unlimited amounts directly to a chosen politician, there’s now nothing stopping them from giving those same funds to a party with the stipulation that that money then get spent on their favored candidate’s campaign.
Given Trump’s stranglehold over the GOP and his ability to bring in oligarchs’ money to boost MAGA candidates’ fortunes, this is one of those ostensibly party-neutral decisions that in practice will benefit a Trumpified Republican Party and candidates most personally loyal to Donald J. Trump.
And so we approach America’s birthday. Frankly, this quarter-millennium event was always going to be a mawkish, sugar-plum fairy version of this country’s complex history. But under Trump, it’s gone from cornball to terrifying. It is a celebration of all things Trump—from his love of violent sports to his fetishization of the military. A country that has long looked with scorn, and even pity, on parts of the globe where power is concentrated in the hands of strongmen now has its own wannabe strongman. A country that has long prided itself on an independent judiciary now has a largely pliant Supreme Court and an entirely pliant Department of Justice. A country that once touted the strength and valor of its legislative process now has a dysfunctional legislature that has ceded almost all its powers to a corrupt executive.
The courts and the legislature aren’t going to rescue us from this mess. But an aroused public just might. You want to celebrate America’s birthday? Then skip the Trump show in Washington, DC, with its huge firework display and its flailing Great America Fair and start organizing. It’s time to shout from the rooftops against MAGA’s perversion of the American Dream and to start articulating a better, kinder, and more decent and honest narrative that can shape America’s next chapters. That’s a far better way to celebrate than mindlessly chanting “USA, USA” while Trump snarls inanities and thinks up more ways to torment the vulnerable and cash in on his political power.
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