The Abdication Caucus

The Constitution gave lawmakers the power to check a reckless executive. It cannot make them use it.

Good morning! Chief Justice John Roberts spent his career building the doctrine that let the Supreme Court’s conservative majority hand Donald Trump his ballroom this week. On Monday, that same doctrine handed him his exit. In a rare dissent, Roberts wrote what his five colleagues declined to: that the demolition of the East Wing and the construction rising in its place is “likely unlawful,” an infringement on “the legislature’s power of the purse and the authority to regulate federal property.” He described, in one sentence, the exact power Congress holds and isn’t using.

That sentence is the real headline, and it isn’t really about a ballroom.

We have developed a habit of describing Trump as though he were some constitutional Pac-Man gobbling up authority wherever he finds it. But presidential power does not expand only because a president reaches for more. It expands when the branch designed specifically to tell him no instead watches him reach across the table and take what belongs to it. None of these stories are about a president seizing power that isn’t his. It is all about the legislature abdicating theirs.

Roberts identified precisely what is being infringed: Congress’s power of the purse and its authority over federal property. Yet the construction continues.

I promise not to spend the morning dwelling on the ballroom, though I remain personally devastated that I will have no opportunity to purchase an age-inappropriate prom dress to celebrate its termination.

A ballroom can wait for Congress to rediscover itself, but a war cannot.

While the United States is fighting one, an extraordinary collection of military officers, former defense officials, and departing Pentagon leaders are all describing different parts of the same institutional failure.

Former Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who says he has worked for roughly a dozen defense secretaries, called Pete Hegseth the most dysfunctional he has ever seen. More importantly, Kendall says Hegseth’s repeated dismissal of senior officers has produced a “climate of fear” inside the Pentagon.

“In that environment,” Kendall said, “nobody is giving honest advice.”

Hegseth has been unusually preoccupied with testosterone as a measure of military fitness. The Pentagon he is building increasingly looks like the bureaucratic equivalent: plenty of testosterone, not nearly enough backbone.

The Army had ten active-duty four-star generals when Hegseth arrived. It now has five. Kendall says enormous amounts of experience and expertise have gone out the door, including officers he describes as among the finest professionals he ever served with. He says the secretary personally removing people from promotion lists is something he had never seen in his career.

Retired Maj. Gen. Randy Manner puts numbers to the purge Kendall describes. He says Hegseth has purged more than 20 senior officers, citing gender, race, and association with senior leaders the administration disfavored, and removed more than 45 candidates from consideration for general or admiral. Kendall’s account of an unprecedented practice, a defense secretary personally striking names from promotion lists, is, in Manner’s telling, not an isolated irregularity but a purge measured in dozens of careers.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll, a reported MAGA Republican and close ally of JD Vance, has now resigned. Reporting in the CNN segment says Driscoll had been deeply involved in internal discussions over readiness for the Iran war and left in part because he believed military readiness was not where it needed to be and objected to Hegseth’s removal of senior officials he considered competent.

Then there is retired Brig. Gen. Steve Anderson, who spent 31 years in Army logistics and is therefore considerably more interesting to me on this subject than somebody whose principal qualification is owning three flag pins and appearing regularly on Fox.

Anderson says the problem is not simply that Hegseth is unpleasant or ideological. He says the Pentagon is being reorganized around a leadership culture that punishes contradiction. The result, he argues, is that people increasingly parrot what senior leaders want to hear rather than tell them what they need to know.

The operational consequences are no longer theoretical. Senior military leaders reportedly warned that the present Iran campaign is unsustainable. Anderson points to the Lincoln’s prolonged combat deployment, the loss of the Bahrain logistics hub, the need to reach all the way to Diego Garcia for supplies, and the cumulative strain of six months of war.

Meanwhile, resources are being drawn from other theaters. Anderson notes munitions moving away from Korea and the George Washington being shifted from Japan toward the Persian Gulf while Chinese activity around Taiwan increases. His broader point is painfully straightforward: every military commitment creates an opportunity cost somewhere else.

This is the stuff competent governments are supposed to worry about: logistics, readiness, munitions, command vacancies, allied confidence, supply lines, and operating tempo. While senior military leaders were warning about all of it, the commander-in-chief spent the weekend posting AI-generated explosions.

Trump showed his followers a synthetic version of Kharg Island being engulfed in spectacular fireballs and announced that the island had been blown “to smithereens.” He declared Iran “DEAD.”

Simon Marks, watching the same feed, called it a fabricated reality and said Trump was demonstrating that he was “no longer fit to serve in office.” Heather Cox Richardson described the same phenomenon through Trump’s reality-TV instincts: move the camera, adjust the lighting, sell the story. But Iran, she argued, is where the technique is failing. “You’re watching that world crumble,” she said, “that fake reality crumble.”

Reality supplied a particularly terrible correction overnight.

American strikes hit Kuhestak in southern Iran, where local authorities say a residential building hosting a wedding was struck. Among those killed, according to the Hormozgan governor’s office: four-year-old Amir Ali Karimi, sixteen-year-old Mohammad Malahi, and two women, Kolsoum Malahi and Zarkhatoun Taheri, both 43. More than 60 people were reported wounded.

CENTCOM says the United States does not target civilians. Fine. That does not explain why an American precision weapon hit that building.

“We don’t target civilians” is an assertion of intent, not an explanation of outcome. CENTCOM had already warned that cutting civilian-protection staff would raise the risk of target misidentification. Systems built to prevent this stop looking like bureaucratic overhead when a four-year-old dies at a wedding.

That is the real war, not the AI version. In Trump’s rendered version, Iran burns beautifully, America dominates, the enemy is dead, and the credits roll.

The actual war contains exhausted crews, damaged bases, depleted stocks, strained logistics, adversaries adapting, allies recalculating, and civilians bleeding in places nobody claims to have intended to bomb.

It is also becoming more complicated the longer it continues.

The Financial Times reports that Russia has been secretly helping Iran develop ramjet propulsion for advanced supersonic cruise missiles capable of posing a new threat to American warships. Russian engineers reportedly analyzed Iranian flight-test results, helped troubleshoot the propulsion system and continued discussions with Tehran into 2026. There is no evidence that a Russian-assisted weapon has yet been deployed, but the strategic lesson is difficult to miss.

Trump keeps declaring Iran isolated and finished. Yet, the longer the war lasts, the more Iran’s weaknesses become somebody else’s opportunity.

Russia gets another theater in which to complicate American planning. China gets to watch Washington shift assets and attention away from the Pacific. Tehran gets additional incentives to deepen relationships with both.

This is precisely the moment the United States needs people willing to tell a president things he doesn’t want to hear. This is precisely the moment the United States needs people willing to tell a president things he doesn’t want to hear. Kendall says Hegseth has created a climate that punishes exactly that. Congress should be hearing alarm bells.

Congress has confirmation, appropriations, and investigative authority. Congress created the oversight architecture surrounding the military because civilian control is not supposed to mean one civilian secretary gets to turn the Pentagon into his personal loyalty contest.

Yet the most visible calls for accountability are coming from individual lawmakers rather than Congress acting as an institution.

Senator Jack Reed can say Hegseth should resign.

That is not the same thing as Congress making the Department of Defense answer for what is happening.

The abdication of responsibility and authority is not confined to the Pentagon, or to a ballroom.

We learned yesterday that a Postal Service whistleblower is warning about a hastily built federal system for screening mail ballots before the midterms. According to the disclosure, its “zero-percent failure” design could allow one barcode mismatch to stop an entire batch of ballots from being mailed. In a batch of 10,000, one mismatch could potentially delay the other 9,999 while officials sort out the discrepancy.

Election officials are worried because mismatches need not represent fraud. Voter files change constantly as people register, move and update their information.

And ballots begin moving now.

North Carolina is preparing to start mailing them Friday.

I will have much more on that separately, because the Postal Service story deserves its own examination.

For this morning, the larger point is enough. The executive acts, the courts scramble, Congress writes letters, and occasionally one of its members gives a very stern television interview. The machinery, dare I say wrecking ball, keeps moving or swinging.

The founders didn’t divide power because they wanted government to look tidy on a civics-class diagram. They divided it because concentrated authority is dangerous, and because competent government requires institutions willing to say no to one another. But separation of powers isn’t self-executing. The Constitution can hand Congress power; it cannot make Congress use it.

That failure carries a cost measured in specifics: officers leaving, senior ranks thinning, Russia helping Iran improve the weapons aimed at American ships, resources pulled from other theaters to cover the gap, a wedding hit by a U.S. weapon, and a president posting synthetic footage of victories that didn’t happen.

What this moment requires isn’t complicated. Senior officers willing to deliver bad news. Civilian officials who value expertise over flattery. Inspectors and career professionals who ask whether something works rather than whether the boss liked hearing it. And a Congress that holds hearings, demands documents, compels testimony, and spends the power of the purse it already holds instead of protecting it in the abstract while watching someone else use it.

Trump understands something Congress is dangerously slow to relearn: power left unused doesn’t stay in storage. Eventually, somebody else picks it up.