Traditionally, top White House and congressional officials were reluctant to engage in tactics that could fundamentally change the separation-of-powers playing field. Knowing that majorities in Congress shift and control of the White House changes hands, there was a clear incentive to maintain balance. “That certainly does not seem to be [Sen.] Mitch McConnell (R-KY)’s way of governing,” Russell Riley, a presidential scholar at the University of Virginia’s nonpartisan Miller Center, told TPM. “That’s, ‘I will do whatever I can do right now and the future be damned.'”
Russell Riley
