During a town hall event on Tuesday, Rep. Bill Foster (D-IL) spoke about his thoughts since President Trump has taken office.
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NewsTranscript
00:00The first that we heard a lot is, what are you doing to stop President Trump from dismantling our federal government?
00:06First off, obviously, I'm a member of the legislative branch. We have a lot of power and there's powers that's reserved to other branches.
00:20Fundamentally, Congress has the power of the purse. We specify the programs that we will fund and the programs we won't fund.
00:30And we give specific instructions for what's to be done with those different pots of money.
00:35There have been violations, in my opinion, of the instructions we gave them.
00:41And this is an old fight. Back when Richard Nixon had a big fight over impoundment, and where he just refused to spend money that Congress allocated.
00:56And it was a big fight and people realized that the Constitution wasn't absolutely clear on that when Congress appropriates money and the executive branch says,
01:05we're not making money. And so what we did after that, what Congress did after that, is they set up a specific set of legislation that says the conditions under which
01:16the executive can refuse to spend money that Congress allocated. Because there are times when that is legitimately necessary.
01:23If the conditions change so it's simply impossible to do a program, you obviously can't spend the money.
01:31And so there are conditions on that that are well prescribed. They give you a few months, it varies from situation to situation,
01:40but typically a few months where the president can refuse to spend money pretty much on any program and then they've got to go back to Congress.
01:49And that's something, a system that was set up assuming that we would have someone of good faith always as president.
01:58And that's a problem, it occurs again and again. We've seen so many instances where our system assumes that you'll have a competent and caring president
02:10with maybe somewhat different priorities, not someone who just wants to destroy everything.
02:14And so those are cases where you go to the third branch of government, the courts. And as I say, we're doing okay so far in those fights.
02:23They haven't gone all the way through the courts. Now in Congress we have limited ability, we for example in almost all situations cannot initiate a lawsuit.
02:35It's sort of strange, I'm not a lawyer and I don't understand, but that's apparently well established precedent.
02:41That Congress, when we allocate money and it doesn't get spent, that we have to, that we can't just file a suit in court.
02:49We depend on third parties and there have been no shortage of really competent third parties that have initiated over 100 suits and so far have not lost a single one on the merit.
03:00Alright, that's encouraging, but it's not the end of the line.
03:04How about the enforcement?
03:07The enforcement? Sure, that's a question. We've seen the edge of, there's a long history here too.
03:19My dad wrote a lot of the enforcement language behind the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
03:26And for those of you who can tell the history of this, it was the Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education back in 1954,
03:34where the Supreme Court said very clearly you cannot have separate school systems for the separate prices.
03:41And for a decade, for a decade, southern school districts and southern federal judges sort of thumbed their nose at the Supreme Court.
03:49And so it has been a slowly hard-won victory that we have an understanding that when the Supreme Court says something, we follow it, period, full stop.
03:58And that's going to be tested, I'm afraid, in the coming weeks and years.
04:04And I am a lot of hope that the Republicans who currently are fully supportive of all of this will draw the line at defying the Supreme Court.
04:16Who knows?
04:18Have a look at what Chief Justice Roberts said today.
04:25This was something where Trump is a nationalist.
04:28And that is a very good start, because Chief Justices seldom speak out in response to just a comment that's made on social media.
04:38But that tells you that he has a red line.
04:43And I disagree with Chief Justice Roberts on a lot of things.
04:47But he seems to have integrity and a real care for the democracy of the United States.
04:55So let's see.
04:57Anyway, so it's a coming fight, is the long answer to that.