Magna Carta is one of the great documents of English history. In 1215, the feudal lords of England, fed up with King John’s arbitrary and capricious rule, forced him to agree to principles of due process and fair dealing. (John was so terrible a king that no king of England since has taken his name.) Among other clauses in Magna Carta, there is a provision that the nobility (the common people didn’t count back then) would not be taxed without their consent:
(12) No ‘scutage’ or ‘aid’ may be levied in our kingdom without its general consent, unless it is for the ransom of our person, to make our eldest son a knight, and (once) to marry our eldest daughter. . . .
(14) To obtain the general consent of the realm for the assessment of an ‘aid’ – except in the three cases specified above – or a ‘scutage’, we will cause the archbishops, bishops, abbots, earls, and greater barons to be summoned individually by letter.
("Scutage" is a medieval word meaning a fee that a knight could pay his feudal lord in lieu of military service.)
The kings of England did not accept this restriction lightly, and many battles — literal and verbal — are fought over the centuries. By the time of the founding of the United States, the principle that the people control the purse was so well established that it is part of the Constitution:
No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time. [Art. I Sect. 9]
Trump is rejecting that principle. As Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her newsletter today:
Trump’s assumption of power over the government’s purse is a profound attack on the principles on which the Founders justified independence from King George III in 1776. The Founders stood firm on the principle articulated all the way back to the Magna Carta in 1215 that the government could not spend money without consulting those putting up that money by paying taxes.
This is in response to Trump’s announcement that — although the government is shut down because it has no legal authority to spend any money — he’s going to pay his goons (a/k/a ICE) and some troops anyway.
Yesterday the Trump administration announced it would pay furloughed troops by using funds Congress appropriated for research, development, testing, and evaluation (RDTE) for fiscal year 2026. Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump had “found a creative solution to keep the troops paid. And rather than congratulate the president for doing that, this unprecedented action to get our troops paid, the Democrats want to sue him for it. They’re saying that it’s illegal.”
Democrats are saying it’s illegal because it is illegal. The Antideficiency Act, a law that has evolved over time since 1870, prohibits the government from spending money that Congress has not appropriated for that purpose, or agreeing to contracts that spend money Congress has not appropriated for that purpose.
Though Richardson doesn’t cite this specific example, Trump’s attempts to claim unilateral power over our money goes back to the time he tried to withhold funds authorized by law to be given to Ukraine until Ukraine agreed to announce it was “investigating” Joe Biden, Trump’s most likely challenger, for . . . something. That got Trump impeached the first time, because back the House was in Democratic hands and they at least had enough wisdom and courage to see that what Trump was trying to do was blatantly illegal and unconstitutional. Unfortunately, the GOP in the Senate couldn’t bring itself to do the same — though for the first time in history, a senator from the president’s party, Mitt Romney, voted to convict.
The lessons Trump learned from that event included his need to so control the Congress that it would never even try to impeach him again (hence his terror over the chance that the Democrats could take back the House in 2026), and that he really could use the threat of withholding funds to compel people to do what he wanted. (Zelenskyy came very close to agreeing to do Trump’s bidding.) Here is HCR again:
Since Trump took office, his administration has undermined the principle that Congress controls funding. It had withheld funds Congress appropriated, a practice that violates the 1974 Impoundment Act and the Constitution. The cost of such impoundment became evident on Sunday, when catastrophic flooding hit the village of Kipnuk, Alaska, a disaster Andrew Freedman of CNN notes was exacerbated by the lack of weather data after cuts left a critical shortage in weather balloon coverage in the area. . . .
Now that the government is shut down, Trump has told reporters that his administration is using the shutdown to take funds Congress appropriated away from Democratic districts.
That’s one half of the coin: taking away money Congress had appropriated by law to be spent. The other side of the coin is just as bad or even worse: (as quoted above) spending money Congress never agreed to spend — and on top of that, spending it when legally he doesn’t have it.
Something more to protest about at the No King rallies tomorrow. Trump doesn’t just want to be king. He wants to be a King John who never had to face Runnymede.
(Later thought) It occurred to me that Trump is like King John in a couple of other ways. John was an absolutely notorious womanizer (though not, so far as I know, a pedophile); he liked to sleep with the wives of his barons and then boast about it. He also managed to lose most of England’s territory on the mainland (OK, Trump hasn’t done that yet, but he’s heading in that direction.)
