Coral Davenport

One way that vote has put it is that Congress gets to set the ceiling.

Congress can set the ceiling of how much will be spent.

But not necessarily the floor.

But the last time a president tried to actually follow through on this idea was Nixon.

President Nixon in the 70s decided not to spend money that had been appropriated by Congress on things that he didn't want to spend.

It was clean water programs, environment programs.

Congress had appropriated this money and the Nixon White House refused to spend it.

And Congress said, whoa, no, we want to make sure that you cannot do that.

And they passed a law.

called the Impoundment Control Act.

But Russ Vogt thinks that the Impoundment Control Act, that that law is unconstitutional.

And he wants to get that impoundment power that he was not able to execute in Trump won all those times that, you know, the White House tried to block money or freeze money and it got undone and the president got impeached.

He's trying to figure out, well, OK, if the law got in the way of that, how can we change the legal landscape?

So what he wants to do is intentionally set up legal fights over the Impoundment Control Act that will eventually go to the Supreme Court where people close to him have said he is supremely confident that the Supreme Court will eventually either...

overturn the Impoundment Control Act, or essentially determine in some way that the president has constitutional authority to block this spending.

Absolutely.

Well, Vote is very much a loyalist and a good soldier who has been there with Trump from the very beginning.

And an interesting thing about what Vote wants to do is that he really is, again, deeply driven by fiscal austerity and cutting budgets, which is an issue that the president does not particularly care about.

But the president sees in vote and in this plan something that can give him a lot of power.

And I think that for vote, vote sees Trump, when president, as someone who can help him realize this vision of much smaller government.