3.2.2.2 –Legislative function of Congress
3.2.2.3 – Congressional oversight
3.3.3.2 – Limitations on presidential power
3.3.4 – Interpretations and Debates
For most of Trump’s second term, Congress has done what Trump wanted. The Republicans who control both chambers rarely pushed back. That is starting to shift. On 13 May 2026, House members forced a vote on military aid for Ukraine, using a tool called a discharge petition. A discharge petition lets a majority of the House, 218 members, drag a bill onto the floor even when the Speaker refuses to schedule it. Every Democrat signed, joined by a handful of Republicans. The bill, the Ukraine Support Act, would send roughly 1.3 billion dollars in aid and hit Russia with new sanctions. Trump opposes both. Congress moved anyway, and went around Speaker Mike Johnson to do it.
A stranger test came days later. On 28 May, the Treasury Secretary held up a mockup of a new 250 dollar note. On it: Trump’s face and signature, designed for America’s 250th birthday on 4 July. There is just one snag. It is against the law. A statute from 1866 says no living person can appear on US currency. So the note cannot be printed unless Congress repeals that law first. The Treasury admitted as much: the decision sits with Capitol Hill, not the White House. A Republican introduced a bill last year to authorise the note. It has gone nowhere. No party leader has put their name to it.
This is the cleanest test of the lot. There is no policy excuse to hide behind, no jobs or tax cut attached. To make it happen, Republicans would have to vote, on the record, to scrap a 160-year-old rule simply to flatter the president. So far, none of them want to own that vote. The bill is stuck, and House Democratic leaders have called it a flat no. Even a loyal majority, it turns out, will not sign off on everything. The note is not a one-off, either. The Treasury has also floated a commemorative dollar coin with Trump’s face on it, part of a wider push to stamp his name across the federal government.
The president’s reach abroad has faced the sharpest test of all. In late February, Trump launched his military campaign against Iran without asking Congress. The House first tried to stop it in March and failed by the narrowest of margins, 212 to 219. In May the Senate inched forward, voting 50 to 47 to drag its own version out of committee, with four Republicans breaking ranks. Then, on 3 June, the breakthrough came. The House passed a resolution ordering Trump to wind down the war, 215 to 208, again with four Republicans crossing the aisle. It was the first time either chamber had passed a war powers measure on a final vote since the fighting began, now almost 100 days ago. Speaker Johnson had fought to stop it, sending members home early for the May recess two weeks before when it looked set to pass. The anger only grew over the break, with some Republicans now hearing from constituents about the war’s rising costs.
There was a third retreat as well. The White House had planned a 1.8 billion dollar fund to pay pardoned January 6 rioters. It dropped the idea once a federal judge blocked the scheme and members of both parties rounded on it.
Each of these tests a different power Congress holds. The discharge petition lets the House overrule its own leadership and force a vote the Speaker wants buried. The war powers votes rest on a simple constitutional point: Article I gives Congress, not the president, the power to take the country to war, and the War Powers Resolution of 1973 was written to enforce it. The currency bill works because Congress writes the law, and the president cannot move without it. The collapse of the rioters’ fund comes back to the oldest lever of all, the power of the purse: Congress decides how public money is spent.
None of this is a rebellion, and none of it forces Trump’s hand on its own. The Iran resolution still needs the Senate, which has not passed its own version, and Trump argues the 1973 law cannot bind him in any case. A forced vote is still just a vote, not a law. He can veto, the Senate leadership is on his side, and the Supreme Court has usually backed his claims to power. But the direction of travel matters. For sixteen months Congress mostly waved things through. Now Republicans in both chambers have broken with Trump over Iran, the House has gone round its own Speaker, and neither party will reward the people who stormed the Capitol. That is a chamber waking up, even if slowly.
All of this speaks to one of the big questions in US politics: the limits of presidential power. The idea of an imperial presidency says modern presidents have grown so powerful that Congress can no longer hold them in check. These past few weeks complicate that. Accountability here rarely looks dramatic. It is not one grand showdown. It is friction, procedure, and the quiet act of refusing to say yes. A banknote that cannot be printed, a war the House has now voted against, and a fund that had to be scrapped are small things on their own. Together, they show that Congress can still say no, even if its no is quieter than it used to be.