House Democrats are not the only White House allies urging the Biden team to accept new curbs. Among the outside advocates joining them is Bob Bauer, Mr. Biden’s personal lawyer.
Last year, Mr. Bauer, who was a White House counsel in the Obama administration, joined with Jack L. Goldsmith, a senior official in the Bush Justice Department, to write a book proposing dozens of curbs on executive power called “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency.” This week, the pair formed an organization called the Presidential Reform Project.
With funding from philanthropic foundations, they are hiring a bipartisan team to lobby Congress. On Wednesday, they sent two letters to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland urging him to take certain steps to protect the Justice Department from politicization and to rescind three Bush-era memos that “take an extreme, indefensible view of presidential war powers.”
“We have the time, but not much time, for progress on reform before midterm politics and then the 2024 election cycle makes it harder,” Mr. Bauer said. “It is critically important to move some reforms in the coming months to achieve momentum for this program.”
By framing the coming House bill as a rebuke of Mr. Trump, Mr. Schiff may risk deterring Republicans — especially amid rumblings that Mr. Trump may run again in 2024. The Senate’s filibuster rule means some Republican support would be necessary there.
But staff aides and advocates say the strategy will be different in the Senate. There, the ideas are likely to be broken up and attached to other bills that, with different casting, are seen as more likely to garner Republican support.
Most of the ideas predate the Trump presidency, said Danielle Brian, the executive director of the Project on Government Oversight, which has sought to improve protections for inspectors general and whistle-blowers.