Congressional Republicans Try a New Approach: Telling Trump No

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Michael Barbaro** (0:27)
From New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. In ways big and small, the Republican-controlled Congress has begun rebelling against President Trump as never before, on everything from the war in Iran to his plan to use taxpayer money to pay his allies. Today, congressional editor Julie Davis on whether the uprising is a preview of a new dynamic in Washington or a temporary show of independence that will vanish just as quickly as it arrived. It's Monday, June 8th.
Julie, it's wonderful to see you.

**Julie Hirschfeld Davis** (1:22)
Great to see you, Michael.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:23)
Thank you for coming on the show, I appreciate it.

**Julie Hirschfeld Davis** (1:25)
Thanks for having me.

**Michael Barbaro** (1:26)
I would say, Julie, I don't think you're gonna contest this, that from the first moment of Trump's second term, the question on kind of everyone's mind was whether the manner in which the president had consolidated his power had basically rendered this Congress, this Republican Congress irrelevant, right? I mean, it very much looked like a co-equal branch of government was choosing subservience very willingly. And we started to ask the question, is Congress over?
And the answer over the past 10 days or so seemed to change. And now it feels more like a no, it's not over.

**Julie Hirschfeld Davis** (2:10)
Yeah, I mean, I think in the first months of President Trump's second term, we were actually surprised on the Hill to see the degree to which Republicans were just deferring to him on everything. Not just refusing to challenge him on things, but actively kind of giving back their power on some pretty key things, on spending, on trade and tariffs, on foreign policy, things that you typically see Congress jealously guarding as its own prerogatives, finding every possible way to give it over to the White House and really even just avoiding voting on things altogether.

**Michael Barbaro** (2:53)
Right, it was literally like a kid in the playground saying, take this toy, take this toy, take this shovel, take this truck.

**Julie Hirschfeld Davis** (2:59)
Right, that was really all we were seeing from Republicans when it came to President Trump. But in the last few weeks, we have seen some pretty rare and unusual resistance coming from Republicans. They're refusing to act on legislation that's a big priority for him, refusing to move on the timelines that he set out for them. They're stripping things from legislation and forcing the administration to drop proposals that they don't like.
And in the case of the war in Iran, they're actually using their power to push back on President Trump.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:37)
They're basically rebelling.

**Julie Hirschfeld Davis** (3:40)
To go back to your playground metaphor, Michael, it's a little bit like a group of kids who have obeyed their daddy for many, many months on pretty much everything and are finally just saying, no daddy, we're not going to do this for you.

**Michael Barbaro** (3:55)
That's quite a vivid completion of the metaphor. So take us behind the scenes of this rebellion, if that's what we're going to be calling it, and we'll get to how durable it is and how far it may or may not go. But let's just understand it to the extent that it has been unfolding.
On the surface, a lot of it seemed to revolve around the weaponization fund, the president's nearly $2 billion effort to compensate people he claims are victims of overzealous government prosecution. But my sense is that that's not quite the full story.

**Julie Hirschfeld Davis** (4:34)
Yeah, it actually started long before the Trump administration announced that they were creating that fund. This has been percolating for many weeks. And it's really, I think, a matter of Republicans sort of slowly and then very quickly waking up to the reality that a lot of what President Trump is doing is actually counter to their own political interests. Let's remember that we are just months away from the midterm elections, and Trump is intervening in Republican primaries against some pretty popular members of their caucus who are incumbents, who are fighting for their political lives.
He intervenes in Louisiana, endorses a Republican congresswoman who's running against Bill Cassidy, the senator who's the head of the health committee, who has spent years in trying to ingratiate himself with Trump after having voted to convict him at his impeachment trial after January 6th. But Trump ultimately decided he wanted to take him out. And did. And he did. And he did. But the second Senate primary where President Trump intervened, and I think the more stinging one that made Republicans a lot angrier, was in Texas, where Senator John Cornyn had been facing a challenge from Ken Paxton, the attorney general.