Kyle Cheney at Politico:
Donald Trump is not a monarch.
That’s the unmistakable lesson of the ill-fated nomination of Matt Gaetz for attorney general. Rather than showcasing Trump’s absolute power over his GOP allies, it revealed his limits. The doomed nomination lasted just eight days — and its failure is an unwelcome lesson for the president-elect, who has been projecting invincibility and claiming a historic mandate despite his reed-thin popular vote victory.
“The short version is ‘checks and balances work,’” said Eugene Volokh, a UCLA professor of law.
Though Republicans will control both chambers of Congress, the resistance from Senate Republicans to Gaetz’s nomination proved that there are still some checks on Trump — no matter how limited — that can hold, despite fear on the left that he will squeeze Congress into submission, get carte blanche from the conservative-dominated Supreme Court and enact his agenda at will.
“I think it shows that Donald Trump cannot get anything he wants,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California-Berkeley School of Law.
Chemerinsky and others cautioned against extrapolating too much from the Gaetz debacle; he was so uniquely despised and compromised by legal and political scandal, and vying for a position that wields unique and extraordinary power, that his failed nomination may not be a harbinger of the pushback Trump may face for other nominees.
In fact, if Trump is able to muscle through his other controversial nominees, the lesson may be that Trump is more unchecked by Congress than ever, said Edward Foley, an Ohio State University constitutional law expert.
