It is the highest achievement of democratic societies that they embody the principle of resistance to government within the principle of government itself. The citizen is thus armed with the “constitutional” power to resist the unjust exactions of government. He can do this without creating anarchy within the community, if government has been so conceived that criticism of the rules becomes an instrument of better government and not a threat to government itself. — Reinhold Niebuhr
Once again, I was not in New Orleans for Mardi Gras. But I was at home to watch the entirety of Donald Trump’s address to Congress — all one hour and forty minutes.
He was not long into his speech before I began to feel sorry for young journalists who would be assigned the task to fact-check it.
First, what should be obvious — no matter how much he proclaims otherwise. He did not win the election in an overwhelming manner that entitles him to govern as if he has a mandate. He won less than 50% of the popular vote. You can look it up. His party has only a slender reed of a majority in the House of Representatives.
How he went on and on about the superabundance of super-centenarians supposedly receiving Social Security benefits. It was more befitting an Emily Litella skit on Saturday Night Live than a presidential address.
In a better world, I can imagine the Vice President eventually having enough on this particular subject and gently interrupting and pointing out to the President that this assertion put out by the Department of Government Efficiency had been debunked, and the President looking into the camera and saying, “Never mind.”
There was a lot more. The President said: “I withdrew from the unfair Paris climate accord which was costing us trillions of dollars.”
Maybe our involvement in the climate accord is a debate worth having. But his counting of the cost is dubious. President Joe Biden apparently thought it a good thing when his White House announced on November 17th of last year that his administration had increased our nation’s contribution to “international climate finance” to $11 billion a year — up from $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2021.
Trump claimed he “terminated” the Green New Deal. That must have been easy. The Green New Deal was proposed as legislation in 2019 — and never made it out of committee.
In regard to tariffs, he said: “We will take in trillions and trillions of dollars and create jobs like we have never seen before.” We’ll see.
He promised to take back the Panama Canal and said it “was given away by the Carter administration for $1.” No such single dollar transaction took place. President Carter did negotiate highly controversial treaties, approved by the U.S. Senate by the way, which did convey ownership of the Canal to Panama.
There is a question over possible Chinese government influence over the canal because of a Hong Kong company, a container terminal operator, which oversees port operations at either end of the canal. An arrangement which the Panama Canal Authority has agreed not to renew. A treaty commitment remains in place that the United States retains the right to react militarily of the Canal Authority does not keep the canal open to the peaceful transit of the ships of all nations.
Trump asserted, in regard to the war in Ukraine, that “Europe has sadly spent more money buying Russian oil and gas than they’ve spent on defending Ukraine, by far.” He claimed that the United States has spent $350 billion on Ukraine. “Like taking candy from a baby,” he said.
Congress, in five different allocations since Russia invaded Ukraine more than three years ago, has authorized $172.2 billion in spending to support Ukraine — all of which is designated to a specific purpose, sometimes humanitarian, and much of which is actually spent in this country as we re-supply our own weapon stockpiles to compensate for (and often improve the quality of) what we have sent to Ukraine. Even if you calculate all the debt service on this amount over the next ten years, it will come to something like $240 billion.
An environmental think tank based in Finland, the Center for Research on Energy and Clean Air, calculated that in 2024 Europe spent $23.6 billion to purchase Russian fossil fuels. The Ukrainian Support Tracker, published by the Kiel Institute in Germany, reported that Europe spent $46.9 billion in 2024 to support Ukraine.
Then there was the $8 million “for making mice transgender.” A person should join the mockery — if that person is against research to understand the effects of hormone therapy on mice to better understand the long-term effects of hormonal therapy on humans.
And speaking of mockery, there was his taunting reference to Stacey Abrams, two-time failed gubernatorial candidate in Georgia, denigrating her association with a non-profit, Power Forward Communities, which received a $2 billion grant through the Inflation Reduction Act for the purpose of affordably “decarbonizing” American homes.
Abrams is a “senior adviser” to one of five non-profit entities which comprise Power Forward Communities. I admit I am suspicious of any government program funded to the nearest billionth dollar. I am also suspicious of the aspersion of guilt by association.
Besides. I have long looked for Trump to acknowledge his debt to Abrams, who devised the playbook in how to monetize lies about the honest outcome of a close election.
The untruths did not end there. But enough.
The show, to my eyes, did not look good from the get-go of Trump’s entrance when, as he proceeded to the rostrum, he did not clasp the hand or even acknowledge the presence of a single Democrat in Hall of the House of Representatives.
Perhaps it did not need to be that way. I read later that the Democratic leadership, both House and Senate, collectively refused to be part of his escort into the Hall, as is traditionally the case when a President is welcomed to speak to a joint session of Congress. Trump undoubtedly felt the slight.
But he did, after all, four years previously encourage a mob to descend upon the Capital — some of whom smashed windows, threatened members, and broke into this very chamber. I would not invite a person into my home who four years previously encouraged people to vandalize it — not absent a mea culpa anyway.
The speech quickly took on the aspect of a campaign rally. Trump’s eyes gravitated consistently to the Republican side of the room. He cast them to the other side only when he delivered an insult.
The countervailing presence of Democrats, with their little signs, was entirely ineffective. When Speaker Johnson ordered the sergeant-at-arms to remove Representative Al Green from the chamber as the Texas Democrat almost comically persisted in his tirade against the President, maybe all or most of the Democrats should have left too.
That way Democrats would not have felt obligated to, in effect, disrespect the President’s guests in the chamber who were there, because of their compelling personal stories, to put a human face on the agenda that the President was trying to sell to the nation. I don’t like, no matter what policies being advanced, presidential use of people as props.
But that does not mean, even in the telling by Donald Trump, the stories of these persons do not incite my admiration or cause my eyes to well. These individuals were invited to Congress by the President of the United States. As such, they are citizens deserving of our respect.
The only televised moment in which a Democrat, in my estimation, appeared to good advantage was when the camera lingered for a short while on the face of the House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries, as he looked, I assume, at the President with a hard stare.
I don’t know, of course, what was actually going in Jeffries’ mind just then. I was regarding Jeffries vicariously — and seeing him, in the House chamber, looking at Trump with emotions akin to mine as I stared at the screen image of Trump in my living room.
The President of the United States was before Congress calling, in no uncertain terms, for widespread destruction of some, or many, of our federal departments and agencies — with little or no regard for why these departments and agencies were instituted in the first place. And the Republicans in the room — some in sycophantic red hats — were cheering him on.
Here is a partial list of things the Trump administration has set about, or has announced its intention, to tear down or to do — entirely through the use of executive orders, which is an end-around Congress:
* Eliminate tens of thousands of civil service jobs — with callous disregard for reduction-in-force procedures statutorily in place.
* End birthright citizenship.
* Dismantle the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) — an agency which has been statutorily recognized by Congress.
* In effect pause National Institutes of Health research.
* All but completely dismantle the Department of Education.
* Shut down the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force — which, as the name implies, was formed to counteract foreign influence in our elections.
* Cut staff to gut the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency — an agency which protects our election systems from electronic hacking.
* Invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to summarily deport immigrants. Some of whom already summarily deported seem to have been here legally and had committed, or been accused of committing, no crime.
* Publicly announce the removal of federal protection for controversial persons, such as John Bolton, Anthony Fauci, Mike Pompeo, who apparently became persona non grata to Trump.
* Go to the Justice Department and label political opponents and lawyers who prosecuted him as “scum,” “corrupt” or “deranged,” many of whom, he said, “should go to jail.” (His address to Justice Department employees on March 14.)
* Issue executive orders designed to punish certain law firms who have opposed him or his policies in court.
Trump, in his address to Congress, made no overture to seek a single Democratic vote to accomplish his goals. With his reliance on executive orders, he seems to think he hardly needs Republican votes either.
But he does. Because, even given all that Congress has surrendered in terms of its self-respect and authority, it still retains the power of the purse. And hard upon his speech was a deadline upon Congress to authorize a “continuing resolution” for the remainder of the current fiscal year — in other words, until the Congress needs to pass a budget for the next fiscal year. Otherwise, the government would “shutdown” at midnight on March 14.
There’s a line from W.C. Fields that goes something like this: “First you insult me, then you ask my advice.”
It is clear that Hakeem Jeffries was determined not to give the Republicans, this time, the benefit of Democratic to keep the government funded. Republicans were reveling in their circus — it was up to them to run it. When it came to vote for the continuing resolution put forth by the Republicans, only one Democrat, Jared Golden from Maine, voted for it. Not every Democratic congressperson is from a safe district, and therefore, for these Democrats, this vote was a matter of personal political risk,
The oft-underestimated Mike Johnson exercised a like discipline on his side of the aisle. All but one member of his Republican caucus, Tom Massie from Kentucky, voted for the continuing resolution. The vote passed 217 to 213.
Johnson accomplished this with a lot of wink-winks. For within the Republican caucus there is an occasionally unruly component self-identified as the Freedom Caucus, which preens itself as fiscal hawks who have refused to support any continuing resolution which maintains spending on a level they regard as fiscally irresponsible. But they were willing to do so in this case because, given Trump’s rhetoric and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, the administration was giving every indication that they were not going to spend much of what the CR was authorizing anyway.
This vote was on March 11. The House thereupon adjourned and many of its members left town — thereby throwing the matter of keeping the government operational entirely into the lap of the Senate and thereby foreclosing any prospect of any compromise between the two houses of the national legislature before March 15.
The Prince of Brooklyn and majority leader of the Senate, Charles Schumer, was confronted with a dilemma — whether to “take arms against a sea of troubles” or to instead “suffer the slings and arrows” of Trump and his Republican minions.
I should not minimize the difficulty of Shumer’s decision.
It may well be that Trump would have welcomed a government shutdown. He would have done his utmost to place the blame on Democrats. And if the Democrats bent to his will, he did not intend to spend money anyway in a manner to provide for the agencies and programs which Democrats wanted provided for. Trump would continue the gutting of agencies and programs — perhaps beyond the point of resuscitation.
Going into the CR debate, Schumer indicated he would not support the Republican version without assurances the funds would be spent as authorized — at a minimum ending the vast “firings” of federal employees. But as the moment of decision neared, Schumer backed down. He said he would allow the CR to come to a vote. Instead, he would let lawsuits continue to argue the legal rightness of Trump’s executive actions. Instead, he would focus on the “reconciliation” fight to form the next federal budget.
Schumer was endeavoring to be an actual adult in the room — but at the same time he was, to this observer from afar, not reading the room well at all.
When it came to avoiding a filibuster of the CR, seven Senate Democrats joined with Schumer and every Republican Senator to bring the measure to enough votes for “cloture.” (Among those Democratic Senators supporting cloture, Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman.)
On the question of the CR itself, it needed only a simple majority to pass — which it did, 54 to 46, without a single Democratic vote. Every Republican senator supported it plus Independent Senator, Angus King of Maine.
Sometimes a hill is worth dying for. In my view, such a hill would be Congress re-asserting itself as the first among equals in our branches of federal government. It is not without significance that it was created by the First Article of our Constitution. Of course, Congress will not fully re-assert itself until such time it proves itself willing to impeach and convict a President.
Maybe the angry voices reportedly heard emanating from the closed caucus of Democratic Senators arguing what they should do concerning the CR was just raw partisanship — and not the rumbling of a component within the Senate willing to begin the re-establishment of Congressional self-respect.
Maybe Schumer’s strategy will ultimately correct. But when such a gentle Democratic knight as Chris Coons of Delaware was willing to throw down the gauntlet now, along with 38 fellow Democratic Senators, to bring fiscal and policy matters with Trump now to a head, the right moment came — and went. If Schumer is right, there will be more such moments.
Sources, Links and Notes:
The Niebuhr quotation is from “The Christian Attitude to Government” in Volume 2 of his The Nature and Destiny of Man.
Fact checking: Peter Gattuso, The Morning Dispatch, March 7, 2020. Fact-Checking Trump's Joint Session of Congress Address
White House Fact Sheet, November 17, 2025: “President Biden Marks Historic Climate Legacy with Trip to Brazil's Amazon Rain Forest.”
Council of Foreign Relations, "Who Owns the Panama Canal?" January 29, 2025
Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air
Matt Vasilogambros, “Election Officials Blast Trump’s ‘Retreat’ from Protecting Against Foreign Threats,” penn.capital-star.com, February 21, 2025.
Here is what Chris Coons had to say on March 14 concerning the passage of the CR:
“Today, we went to the Senate floor needing to choose between two awful options. We could move forward on a disastrous funding bill that enables Elon Musk’s and President Trump’s ongoing teardown of the government and cuts billions of dollars from defense spending, or we could shut down the government, furloughing hundreds of thousands of federal employees who are already concerned about their job security, and potentially even the courts that are currently the sole check on their power.
“This was a false choice. There was always a third option, letting the appropriators do their jobs, finish the nearly completed FY 25 spending process, and give the American people a bipartisan solution rhat would allow them to feel confidence in their government. This is the option that we should have taken, and the option that I have spent weeks pushing for. Republican leadership refused to entertain the idea.
“Given the two choices before us this afternoon, I voted to block the Republican funding bill that enables Musk’s and Trump’s piecemeal government shutdown. Some of my Democratic colleagues chose differently, and I respect their decision. Blame doesn’t lie with Democrats who were forced to choose between two terrible outcomes. It belongs to Trump and his allies in Congress who rammed through a partisan, hardline spending bill so they can move to their priority of cutting Medicaid to pass more tax cuts to billionaires, and my Republican colleagues who would rather consign themselves to irrelevance than protect their constitutional appropriations responsibilities from executive overreach.”