Frustrated lawmakers are looking to 2026 in the hopes that they can reclaim some of the power many fear they’ve ceded to the White House under Trump.
Over the course of 2025, the Trump administration unilaterally shuttered or drastically weakened federal agencies, implemented widespread tariffs, canceled congressionally approved spending and conducted military operations in the Caribbean.
Democrats repeatedly cried foul, and even some Republicans aired concerns about the White House brushing aside Congress. Scores of lawmakers opted for retirement before the calendar even turned to January.
Now many are wondering whether anything will be different next year, especially with the added political pressure of the approaching midterm elections.
No, I’m saying that new constitutional theory was created that lets political and judicial leaders interpret the rules any way they like. The document itself is meaningless now and as such can’t be enforced. Any accusation of something being unconstitutional is countered by different interpretation of the same laws and there’s no independent, impartial body to say which one is correct.
So in practice the legislative branch creates any laws they want, the partisan judicial branch finds some creative interpretation of the constitution that legitimizes them and the executive is forced to follow them. The Supreme Court has on many occasion invented completely new laws claiming that they are somehow defined by the constitution and even reversed it’s ruling later interpreting it in the opposite way. The majority is free to decide what the constitution says and the document itself is useless now.
Surely those sorts of things could happen in any country. There’s no constitution that is inherently more than just words on paper.
But it is not happening in many other countries. In most modern democracies the judiciary is independent and interprets the constitution faithfully because trying to weaken it doesn’t serve it interests. Unlike US constitution, most modern constitutions are also written in contemporary language that has specific, legal meaning and can’t be reinterpreted freely. In most countries there are no alternative theories about what the people that wrote the document really meant or how the system is designed work. Most of those issues are specific to US. And I’m only saying “most” because I don’t know the situation in all other modern democracies but I’m not aware of any other system which is as broken as the one in US and is still considered a democracy.