JMTV

I am an associate counsel in the White House Counsel's Office. Since April I have been preparing for an election that will not change very much. On Tuesday, Americans will choose a new Congress. More than 50 million of them have already voted early, in school gyms, in the rain, with their IDs and their convictions. I admire them. I have spent seven months building the binder that makes their decision mostly decorative. Reuters reported it this morning. Since April, senior officials "have been working with the White House Counsel's Office" to identify executive actions on "immigration, tariffs, housing costs and federal spending that Trump could pursue without congressional approval." The White House spokeswoman said the media was promoting a false narrative. She is right that it is a narrative. It is 412 pages, three-hole punched, and color-tabbed. Blue tabs are things we can do without Congress. Yellow tabs are things we can do without Congress if a judge is slow. Red tabs are things we can do without Congress and then defend in court, which my office describes, in a phrase Reuters now has verbatim, as "where he could push the limits of his authority and how to defend those decisions in court." There are no green tabs. Green was for things that require Congress. We ordered a box in April. They are currently used as bookmarks inside the GAO letters, because the binder clips kept failing under the weight of the red tab. The three-hole punch has an open maintenance ticket. It reads: "Excessive use." The binder has started to have opinions. Every morning I find the wind turbine finding in the blue tab, where someone has moved it overnight. Every morning I move it back to yellow before the 8 a.m. stand-up. Nobody admits to moving it. The building is full of people who believe things belong in the blue tab. When Reuters asked how comfortable the President would be governing without the legislature, a person familiar with the plans gave a two-word answer: "very comfortable." I want to be precise as a lawyer. Those two words are the entire constitutional theory of my office. Everything else in the binder is footnotes. The President has been candid. "I guess I'll become Mr. Veto," he told the New York Post on Sunday. "And then at some point, we'll probably make deals." I have already prepared the vetoes. It is a mail merge. Each begins with the traditional words, "I am returning herewith without my approval." Column A: "Bill title (to be supplied by the future Congress)." Column B: "Harm to an agenda that will continue regardless," with a dropdown menu. Democracy fills in Column A. I already filled in Column B. The tariff tab is my favorite, because the Supreme Court has already read it. In February, the Court ruled that the President could not impose tariffs under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act. Chief Justice Roberts wrote that "the economic and political consequences of the IEEPA tariffs are astonishing." When Congress delegates tariff power, the Court said, "it has done so in explicit terms, and subject to strict limits." It was a beautiful opinion. I had it bound. Within hours, the President invoked Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974 and imposed a 10 percent global surcharge. In the IEEPA case, the government's own lawyers had told a court that Section 122 did not "have any obvious application here." Then it was the application. That is what a statute is for in my office. It is a spare tire. You do not ask whether it fits the car. You ask whether it gets you to Tuesday. The Treasury Secretary then announced that combining Sections 122, 232 and 301 "will result in virtually unchanged tariff revenue in 2026." The Supreme Court struck down the tariffs, and the revenue was virtually unchanged. The Court won the argument and lost the money. I think about that sentence when people tell me the midterms matter. Section 122 lasts 150 days unless Congress extends it, so we treated it like a parking meter in a city you intend to leave before the officer arrives. Section 232 has no expiration date at all. It only requires the Commerce Department to find a threat to national security. It is the statute that does not know it is a spare. The new tariffs on wind turbines would run through it. Here is the current draft: Binder excerpt, Tab 7(c): "Upon review, the Secretary finds that imports of wind turbines threaten to impair the national security of the United States because" The sentence ends there. The analysts are still workshopping the because. Wind has not retained counsel. Then there are emergencies. The President declared a national energy emergency on his first day in office. In August he declared another, to secure the "bulk-power system." An emergency, in my practice, is a statute with a better publicist. Congress can vote to end one, but the President can veto that vote, and overriding him takes two-thirds of both chambers. A Democratic House would need 290 votes to end an emergency the President declared alone. It took one signature to start it. The math is the policy. Our budget director, Reuters reports, is examining "which priorities can move forward using money already appropriated by Congress." This is the most elegant part of the binder, because it uses Congress against Congress. The new Congress will hold the purse. We will spend the old one's. When the money runs low, there is the pocket rescission: propose canceling funds so close to the end of the fiscal year that Congress cannot respond before they expire. In September we cancelled $810 million that way. The Government Accountability Office told Congress this was unlawful. "The Constitution vests in Congress the power of the purse," its general counsel wrote. "The President may not force the expiration of budget authority Congress has already enacted and did not rescind." Some federal judges have concluded only GAO can sue over this. GAO has not sued us. It writes letters. I keep them in the yellow tab, with the green tabs inside. A watchdog that only writes letters is a pen pal. Then there is the part I wrote personally: the investigations. Reuters reports that White House lawyers "have been briefing political appointees and agency leaders on how to handle congressional inquiries, document requests and subpoenas," and that we "have advised officials to be careful about what they put in writing." I gave that briefing eleven times. The deck was titled "Writing Things Down: A Risk Assessment." It had forty slides. By the eleventh session I had cut it to one. The slide says: "Do not." The audience is asked to memorize it, because the deck is privileged and cannot be emailed. Someone always asks for the slides. I always say no. That is the briefing. We have also, Reuters reports, sought a Justice Department opinion that "could allow Trump to invoke executive privilege to shield communications with private advisers from congressional scrutiny." Executive privilege was invented to protect the President's conversations with his government. We are extending it to people who are not in the government. Next year, to people he has thought about talking to. The year after that, the binder. I am drafting the privilege log now. Entry 1 is this document. The distribution list includes the binder, which I have started addressing in memos as if it were a colleague. It has more authority than most of them. People ask whether I worry a Democratic Congress will stop us. I show them the spreadsheet. Column A lists every outcome on Tuesday. Column B lists what changes. In every row it says "subpoenas." Under that, in smaller type: "and confirmations." Smaller still: "and the mood." And in a font size the Paperwork Reduction Act does not recognize: "and the number of times we will have to explain that the binder was always the plan." Democrats need a net gain of four seats to take the House. The President needs zero seats to sign an executive order. In July 2025, Congress passed the President's tax and spending package, and he signed it. That is the one time this administration needed Congress. We framed the pen. Last night I started a sentence for the binder's introduction. I wrote: "The people in the school gyms deserve to know that what they are voting on is" I stopped there. I struck it out and replaced it with the approved blue-tab language: "The Administration will continue to deliver for the American people under any configuration of the legislative branch." The strikethrough is still visible on the page. I have logged it as a draft. Drafts are privileged. On Tuesday night, I will watch the returns with everyone else. Anchors will say "historic" and "referendum" and "mandate." Interns will cry in both directions. Sometime after midnight, I will go back to the office, open the binder to the cover page, and change one word. The cover page reads: "Contingency Plan: Democratic Congress." On Wednesday I will cross out "Contingency." I will use a red pen. Red pens are now logged in the yellow tab, because Counsel's Office has determined that ink is discoverable. Then I will be very careful about what I put in writing, starting immediately after this. See privilege log, entry 412. Currently being drafted.