Democratic House members are writing bills to rein in a president’s emergency powers. Lawyers are strategizing about how to insulate the Justice Department from presidential influence. A House measure would block a president from unilaterally remodeling the White House. Ethicists are writing rules to prevent a future first family from self-dealing.
Throughout Washington and beyond, President Donald Trump’s opponents are scrambling to ensure that after he leaves office, the changes he has imposed on the presidency, and the country, will fade with him.
Whether they succeed could determine whether Trump’s aggressive exercise of executive powers will be limited to a finite stretch of U.S. history or will instead become a model for every president to come.
Rep. Jamie Raskin (Maryland), the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said that Trump’s uses of presidential power can and must be reversed — but doing so will take decades.
“We have a massive reconstruction task ahead of us,” Raskin said in an interview. “Fortunately, reconstruction has a great history in our country, and when it’s allowed to work, it has been a lot more successful than either authoritarianism or revolution. … We will have to go department by department, subject by subject, and public purpose by public purpose to determine what we salvage and what we re-create.”

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