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President Trump is firing government watchdogs, trying to shutter entire agencies and pausing spending on things he says don't fit his agenda. And his efforts to transform the government are putting him on a collision course with laws adopted after the Watergate scandal of the 1970s. NPR senior White House correspondent Tamara Keith reports.
TAMARA KEITH, BYLINE: In January 1974, months before President Richard Nixon resigned, Democratic Senator Walter Mondale was already talking about reform.
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WALTER MONDALE: There's been a trend toward what I call the imperial presidency. And, of course, we've seen it in its exaggerated form under Mr. Nixon.
KEITH: The lessons of Watergate, he told NPR at the time, could be very important for the country.
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MONDALE: And if we can, before this is over, establish the principle that any president, including this one, is under the law and must respond to the Constitution and the courts, and to the Congress and the American people, we will have saved ourselves from a very dangerous trend.
KEITH: A new class of lawmakers swept into Congress the following year with a mandate for reform, says Bruce Shulman of Boston University.
BRUCE SHULMAN: Nixon's removal from office in 1974 really kind of initiated a widespread and bipartisan effort to limit presidential power, to try to clean up corruption, to make the government more transparent.
KEITH: Congress created a sweeping list of new checks on the executive branch. It included placing inspectors general in federal agencies, and new ethics requirements. Andrew Rudalevige is at Bowdoin College.
ANDREW RUDALEVIGE: You know, these are a bunch of laws that are meant to serve as notice of congressional intent to stand up against presidential overreach.
KEITH: Those dusty laws from the 1970s are back in the news in a big way. Since taking office, Trump has been purging watchdogs, including firing more than a dozen inspectors general. He blew past a law requiring cause and advance notice to Congress. Here's Stanford Law professor Anne Joseph O'Connell.
ANNE JOSEPH O'CONNELL: So as the statute is written, what President Trump did violates the law. Now, whether this conservative Supreme Court would uphold that law is uncertain.
KEITH: The White House is arguing that because these watchdogs work in the executive branch, President Trump has the authority to fire them - no matter what the laws written by Congress say.
BLAKE EMERSON: Those are plausible legal arguments. They were not plausible legal arguments 20 years ago, but they are now.
KEITH: Blake Emerson at UCLA Law says the Supreme Court, with its conservative supermajority, has started to him in Congress' ability to oversee the executive branch.
EMERSON: The post-Nixon reforms are under challenge and may fall by the wayside.
KEITH: Another law under pressure is the Impoundment Control Act. It emphasized that Congress has the power of the purse, after President Nixon refused to spend funds as directed by Congress. Trump officials say the law is unconstitutional and are trying to move ahead with slashing programs and agencies, though Trump's efforts are hitting a wall in federal courts. Gene Healy is with the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
GENE HEALY: I work at Cato. I'd like to see a lot of agencies eliminated. I don't think an effort to do that is going to get very far without Congress.
KEITH: Congressional Republicans aren't pushing back on Trump's moves, and that, too, is part of a long-term trend. Here is Bowdoin College's Rudalevige again.
RUDALEVIGE: And the phrase I've been using for 20 years is that you can't have an imperial president without an invisible Congress, and that's clearly true today.
KEITH: Shulman at Boston University agrees. This didn't start with Trump, but in his second term, the president is pushing new boundaries.
SHULMAN: What we're seeing now is a kind of final campaign - a frontal attack on the last vestiges of that particular post-Nixon historical moment.
KEITH: For a generation, the narrative was that Watergate ushered in greater congressional oversight and a taming of presidential power. But Shulman says it also sparked a movement on the political right to restore largely unchecked presidential authority. And that movement has seen a string of successes in recent years. Tamara Keith, NPR News, the White House. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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