10
Loading video...
By Tom Rogers
Editor-at-Large for Newsweek
0
Share
Newsweek is a Trust Project member
See more of our trusted coverage when you search.Prefer Newsweek on Googleto see more of our trusted coverage when you search.
With the midterms only weeks away, we are watching in real time how far a president will reach for power—and whether the country will enforce the constitutional limits he is defying.
September 17 is Constitution Day. There will be no fireworks or national parades. No long weekend. Most Americans probably won’t know it’s happening. That’s remarkable, because Americans don’t have to search very hard right now for a real-world constitutional lesson.
We’ve watched fights over executive orders, presidential power, federal judges and the Supreme Court. “Can he actually do that?” has become one of the recurring questions of the Trump era. Now, one of the most consequential constitutional tests has been unfolding as we approach the midterm elections in November.
Read More on Opinion
President Donald Trump has been trying to get Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would impose major new federal requirements involving proof of citizenship and mail-in voting. The votes aren’t there in the Senate, so he has pursued other routes, whether the Constitution gives him that power or not.
...
He has directed federal agencies to assemble citizenship information that could be used to determine voter eligibility state by state. His Justice Department has demanded voter-roll information from states. And he has pushed the U.S. Postal Service toward new requirements governing mail ballots, including refusing ballot delivery if states don’t comply with federal demands. Democratic voters are also more likely than Republicans to vote by mail, giving those changes an obvious partisan significance.
These are extraordinary steps for a president to take in an election system administered primarily by the states and where the Constitution gives Congress, not the president, the principal federal role in regulating them.
This effort to transform the U.S. Postal Service into essentially an election administrator has been appealed to the Supreme Court twice just in the last few weeks and has been blocked twice with the most recent ruling occurring this week.
We can take solace that the courts have so far protected the right to vote. At least for the midterms, it appears that the sacred democratic right to vote will be upheld and the Trump voter suppression scheme will not go into effect with less than 60 days before the midterms, particularly since the bare elements of a truly developed implementation process to assure its credibility have not been developed by the Postal Service.
Nonetheless, the legal fight is far from over, but Trump has been giving us his own answer for years. In 2019, he said Article II gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” In February of last year, he declared on Truth Social that “he who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” When asked on Meet the Press in May 2025 whether he was required to uphold the Constitution, he answered, “I don’t know.” This year, asked by the New York Times about restraints on power abroad, he said his “own morality” and “own mind” were the only things that could stop him.
Those are astonishing statements for an American president to make, and his conduct has demonstrated the same instinct. This year, after the Supreme Court ruled that the emergency law did not authorize his sweeping tariffs, Trump quickly turned to another statute.
There could hardly be a better time in recent history for Constitution Day to matter.
Its full name is Constitution Day and Citizenship Day, to commemorate both the signing of the Constitution in 1787 and the responsibilities of citizenship in a constitutional democracy. Federal law requires schools receiving federal funds to hold a program about the Constitution, too.
The Task Force for American Democracy, a bipartisan nonprofit of which I am a member, is using the occasion as part of a much broader effort to mobilize lawyers, educate communities about the rule of law, protect an independent press and help citizens understand and defend the constitutional rules governing our elections.
So Constitution Day has plenty of programming. What it largely does not have is an audience.
That is the irony. Constitution Day itself may struggle for an audience, but today’s constitutional fights have a growing one. Many Americans barely care whether a president has too much power. The problem is getting Americans to understand that too much presidential power does not become acceptable just because one side likes how it is being used. If constitutional limits only matter when they constrain the other party, then they are not really limits at all.
Trump believes the country needs much tougher safeguards against illegal voting, and millions may agree, favoring proof-of-citizenship requirements and tighter rules for mail ballots. Fine. That tells us what result they want. It tells us nothing about what power the president has to enact it.
There is a very simple test here. Would you give the same power to the other party? If Republicans believe Trump can exercise federal power over elections that Congress has refused to authorize, would they have given President Biden the same power? If the answer changes with who occupies the White House, then a side is being defended, not a constitutional principle.
The stakes become much higher once the votes are cast. I have written before about what could happen if Democrats win enough seats in November to take control of Congress and Trump claims particular election results are fraudulent. Allegations of illegal voting, fraud or foreign interference could lead to federal investigations, delayed results and certification disputes. If protests followed, Trump could then claim even broader emergency powers, including the little-known Presidential Emergency Action Documents, or PEADs, maintained for extreme national crises.
Given how expansively he has spoken about presidential power, it would be foolish to wait until after Election Day to start deciding where the constitutional limits are. Former Senator Timothy Wirth and I have written before about what we called a “people’s firewall” against an effort to overturn legitimate election results. The idea is simple: Make clear before a crisis that officials, civic groups and business leaders will encourage all citizens to vote, defend an accurate count and resist any effort to override legitimate results.
As November approaches, that firewall must be in place again. The Task Force for American Democracy is doing its part by holding election-law forums and preparing legal professionals to defend the integrity of the 2026 elections.
It would be naive to assume that just because the president’s plan to undermine the integrity of the midterms has now been set back by the Supreme Court, that he will not persist in attempting to find ways to create election chaos. Lawyers need to be ready to challenge unlawful interference with voting, counting or certification. State and local election officials need to know where federal authority ends and theirs begins. Members of Congress need to make clear before Election Day that the voters, not the president, determine which party controls the next Congress.
Most importantly, citizens need to insist on the same constitutional limits whether they help their side or the other. That is what Constitution Day and Citizenship Day should mean in 2026.
Even if Americans barely notice Constitution Day itself, the constitutional lesson this year may be impossible to miss. We may find out whether the people in power will still obey the Constitution when it curtails their power. If they don’t, then the people no longer determine who governs us. The people in power do.
Tom Rogers is executive chairman of the AI film studio Fountain 0, executive chairman of agentic AI company Claigrid, Inc., the founder of CNBC, an on-air CNBC contributor, a member of the Task Force for American Democracy.
The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.
View 0 Comments
Submit Correction
View Editorial & AI Guidelines