And it's that no matter how hard he tries, he still is not a dictator yet, and must answer to we the people
www.politico.com/...
Congressional members didn’t just snub Donald Trump on his border wall: They also used the $1 trillion spending deal hatched over the weekend to rein in the president’s powers.
Lawmakers want the Trump administration to lay out a detailed plan to deal with the Islamic State and Syria’s Bashar Assad. So they tucked in a provision in the 1,665-page spending plan to withhold $2.5 billion in defense funds until the proposal to battle ISIS is produced.
The measure also contains three separate reminders for Trump, who did not seek congressional approval before launching missile strikes against the Syrian government last month, that he must obey the War Powers Act. That law limits his ability to send U.S. troops into combat without a congressional vote.
But [the provisions are] taking on new significance in the Trump era and the conservative stances of its top officials.
Trump officials asked Congress last fall to punt a full-year spending measure to 2017 so the new president could leave his own imprint on spending priorities, but he notched few wins in the so-called omnibus funding bill that’s set to glide through both chambers of Congress this week. After trumpeting the need for his border wall and threatening to withhold funding for payments to insurers that stabilize the Affordable Care Act, Trump relented on both, though he did win a healthy funding boost for the military.
But with the other, less-noticed provisions, Congress is also asserting itself as a counterweight to the authority of the commander in chief. The omnibus funding bill strikes at Trump the most when it comes to foreign policy and national defense — an arena where he’s espoused unorthodox views outside the mainstream of both parties.
The spending bill reminds Trump that he must follow the War Powers Act if he wants to send U.S. troops further into harm’s way in Iraq and Syria. The Iraq provision says the president must follow the war powers measure before introducing U.S. armed forces “into hostilities in Iraq, into situations in Iraq where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, or into Iraqi territory, airspace, or waters while equipped for combat.”
The Trump administration also must submit a report within 90 days outlining its strategy for dealing with the Assad regime. That requirement is especially relevant in the aftermath of Trump’s airstrikes in Syria last month. Trump won bipartisan praise from Congress, even as lawmakers demanded that Congress be engaged prior to any future military action against Assad.
Lawmakers are also eager to hear from the administration on how it plans to combat the Islamic State, and will withhold $2.5 billion of defense spending until it does so.
The funding measure also tries to force the Trump administration to take a harder line toward Russia. That’s a sensitive subject for Trump, whose presidential campaign is being investigated by the FBI over allegations it colluded with Moscow to damage Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
The measure allocates money to a new fund totaling at least $100 million to counter Russian influence. It will finance measures to promote good governance in areas that are coming under pressure from Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to a summary of the measure from Senate Democrats.
“Overwhelmingly, we were very pleased with the outcome on issue after issue, both on the spending side and the legislative side, the poison-pill side,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. “I would not say there’s a major loss in here.”
Democrats played hardball and got some nifty concessions while trump got, not much.