Centrist Independent Voter has endorsed Democratic Senator Chris Coons for reelection to the United States Senate from Delaware in 2026.
Coons will face Republican Michael Katz, a physician, businessman and former Delaware state senator. Our full Delaware Senate evaluation examines both candidates across foreign policy, presidential power, tariffs, taxation, health care, immigration, election administration, abortion and gun policy.
The endorsement reflects areas of both agreement and disagreement with Coons. His record on foreign policy is especially well developed. He has been a strong supporter of Ukraine and NATO, has taken substantive positions on China and Taiwan, Israel and Iran, and has repeatedly defended a congressional role in decisions involving war and presidential tariff authority.
Coons also differs from some members of his party in ways relevant to our evaluation. He does not advocate Medicare for All, has supported border enforcement as part of broader immigration reform, and has demonstrated a willingness to support some Trump administration nominees while opposing the most troubling ones. His record on biomedical research has also included significant bipartisan work.
There are important areas where CIVPAC disagrees with him. We do not favor his proposal to tax unrealized gains of extremely wealthy taxpayers, and several of his gun-control positions go farther than we would. We also generally favor a smaller and less regulatory federal government.
Katz presents a different problem. His campaign emphasizes fiscal discipline, deregulation, immigration enforcement and his experience as a physician. But on several issues important to CIVPAC, his positions remain either unclear or insufficiently developed. We found no sufficiently specific positions on Ukraine and NATO, China and Taiwan, Israel and Iran, presidential war powers, abortion, the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid or federal biomedical-research funding.
His current platform also repeatedly aligns itself with President Trump while leaving unanswered how Katz would respond when he disagreed with the president. Those questions matter particularly in evaluating a Senate candidate, because one of the Senate’s constitutional responsibilities is to provide an independent check on executive power.
Our endorsement of Coons therefore does not reflect agreement with him across the board. It reflects our assessment of the available record, including foreign policy, institutional independence, health care, trade, immigration, elections and the role of divided government.
U.S. Capitol with the White House and Supreme Court in the distance, illustrating Congress’s constitutional role in checking executive power.
The Supreme Court’s recent decision allowing construction of President Trump’s White House ballroom to continue raises an issue that extends far beyond the ballroom itself.
On August 31, the Court stayed a lower-court injunction that would have halted above-ground construction. Importantly, the Court did not decide that the President had legal authority to undertake the project without congressional approval. Instead, the five-Justice majority concluded that the government was likely to prevail in showing that the National Trust for Historic Preservation lacked Article III standing to challenge it. The Court expressly said that it was not passing on the legality of the project. (Supreme Court decision)
That distinction matters.
A presidential action can potentially exceed the President’s lawful authority and yet escape judicial review because no plaintiff who objects to it can establish the concrete and particularized injury required by Article III. Indeed, Chief Justice John Roberts, joined by Justices Sotomayor, Kagan and Jackson, concluded in dissent that the ballroom construction was likely unlawful because Congress has expressly prohibited construction of buildings on federal grounds in the District of Columbia without congressional authorization. (Supreme Court decision)
We have seen versions of this problem before.
During President Trump’s first term, 215 members of Congress sued alleging that his receipt of benefits from foreign governments violated the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause. The D.C. Circuit dismissed the case because the individual legislators lacked standing to assert an institutional injury belonging to Congress. (D.C. Circuit opinion) Other litigation over the Emoluments Clauses ended without a definitive Supreme Court ruling on the merits. After Trump left office, the Supreme Court vacated judgments in two of the major cases and directed that they be dismissed as moot. (Congressional Research Service / Constitution Annotated)
Standing doctrine serves important purposes. Federal courts are not supposed to issue advisory opinions whenever someone believes a president has exceeded his authority. But the practical consequence is unavoidable: the judiciary cannot always be counted upon to police the boundary between presidential and congressional power.
Sometimes Congress has to do it itself.
That has implications for how CIVPAC evaluates candidates for the House and Senate.
Members of Congress are not simply representatives of a political party that happens to control or oppose the presidency. They are members of an independent constitutional branch. Appropriations, tariffs, war powers, oversight, confirmations, subpoenas and numerous other powers belong to Congress precisely because the Framers did not want them exercised solely by a president.
A candidate for Congress should therefore be willing to exercise those powers even when doing so means opposing a president of his or her own party.
That is becoming an increasingly important part of our endorsement decisions.
The difficulty is that genuine political independence has become uncommon in both parties. Members of Congress face enormous pressure from presidents, party leaders, activists and primary voters to treat loyalty to their party as more important than loyalty to the institution in which they serve.
When we have affirmative evidence that a candidate will resist that pressure, it should count heavily in the candidate’s favor.
Senator Susan Collins provides an example. We do not agree with every vote she casts. But she has demonstrated a willingness to defend congressional authority against a Republican president. She joined bipartisan legislation requiring congressional approval for presidential tariffs and opposed President Trump’s unilateral tariffs on Canada. (Collins on congressional tariff authority) On war powers, she has likewise maintained that sustained military action requires congressional authorization and, when the War Powers Act’s 60-day deadline was reached in the 2026 Iran conflict, voted to terminate continued hostilities absent further congressional approval. (Collins on war powers)
That kind of record matters.
When such evidence is absent, the calculation becomes more difficult.
If legislators of both parties normally support presidents of their own party, then electing members of the president’s party tends, as a practical matter, to weaken the legislative check on executive power. Electing members of the opposing party tends to strengthen it.
That does not mean CIVPAC should automatically endorse Democrats when a Republican occupies the White House, or Republicans when a Democrat does. Candidate quality, policy positions, respect for democratic institutions and the particular circumstances of the race still matter.
But other things being reasonably close, our burden of proof should change.
A congressional candidate from the president’s party should give us some reason to believe that he or she is prepared to be a legislator rather than simply a presidential ally. A demonstrated record of independence can satisfy that test. Mere assurances of independence should receive considerably less weight.
The Framers created three branches of government because they did not expect any one of them to be permanently trustworthy.
The courts cannot always intervene. When they cannot, Congress must be willing to be Congress.
In 2020, Bob Bauer and Jack Goldsmith published After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency. The book argued that Donald Trump’s first term had exposed serious weaknesses in the constitutional guardrails, laws, norms, and institutional practices that constrain the presidency. They offered reforms covering conflicts of interest, foreign influence, abuse of the pardon power, Justice Department independence, special counsel rules, war powers, emergency powers, vacancies, and other areas where presidential power had proven more vulnerable to abuse than many Americans had assumed.
It was an important book. It was also, in retrospect, optimistic.
The premise seemed to be that Trump had revealed the weak points in the system, and that responsible people in both parties might respond by repairing them. That was not a foolish hope. After Watergate, Vietnam, and the Church Committee, Congress did enact reforms intended to constrain executive abuse. The American system had failed before, learned from the failure, and tried to build stronger guardrails.
But that requires goodwill.
It requires elected officials who care not only about whether their side wins, but about whether the rules survive. It requires members of Congress to defend Congress as an institution. It requires courts to enforce legal limits where they can. It requires political parties to screen out candidates who are plainly hostile to constitutional restraints. It requires voters to punish misconduct even when the misconduct is committed by someone who says the things they want to hear.
The Constitution is not self-executing. Neither are statutes. Neither are norms.
Rules work only when enough people in positions of power feel some obligation to preserve them. When that obligation disappears, the rules become less like walls and more like lines painted on the floor.
That is the lesson of the current moment.
It would be naive to pretend that presidents of both parties have never bent, scraped, or even occasionally jumped the guardrails. They have. American history is full of examples of executive overreach, partisan hardball, and self-justifying claims of necessity. But the current moment feels different in scale, scope, and intent. What once appeared as episodic abuse now looks increasingly like a systematic effort to convert weak points in the constitutional order into ordinary tools of governance.
The problem is no longer simply that Trump found weak points in the presidency. The problem is that those weak points are now being used as a governing strategy. Conflicts of interest, attacks on law enforcement independence, pressure on neutral institutions, threats against political opponents, abuse of pardon and prosecutorial discretion, and the blending of public power with private grievance are no longer aberrations. They are becoming part of the operating manual.
A revised edition of After Trump would not be a 400-page book. It might be 1,000 pages.
That is not because the first book was inadequate. It is because the second Trump term is testing whether the American political system can respond to known vulnerabilities after one party has decided that exploiting them is preferable to repairing them.
Republicans should think harder about what they are teaching.
They may believe that bending the rules is justified because Trump is their candidate, because Democrats are worse, because the bureaucracy is hostile, because the press is unfair, or because the stakes are too high to lose. Those rationalizations are not new. Every faction that weakens institutional restraints tells itself that its emergency is unique.
But no party stays in power forever.
At some point, a Democrat will win the presidency. Perhaps that Democrat will be center-left, restrained, and institutionally minded. Or perhaps the next successful Democrat will be a left-wing ideologue with Trump’s appetite for grievance and Trump’s willingness to use public power against enemies. Perhaps that person will also be a gifted performer, a relentless fundraiser, and a shameless grifter.
If Republicans believe that possibility is impossible, they are fooling themselves.
Every precedent they set now will be available later. Every weakened ethics rule, every politicized prosecution, every retaliatory investigation, every permissive theory of presidential power, every excuse for self-dealing, every attack on neutral administration, every effort to turn law enforcement into a partisan weapon—those lessons will not be forgotten by their opponents.
Republicans may think they are building a fortress. They may be building a road map.
This is the part of constitutional politics that partisans often refuse to see. A rule that protects only your side is not a rule. A norm that matters only when the other party violates it is not a norm. A legal restraint that depends entirely on whether the president feels like obeying it is not much of a restraint at all.
That is why goodwill matters.
Goodwill does not mean weakness. It does not mean refusing to fight for policy goals. It does not mean pretending that the parties are the same or that disagreements are unimportant. It means recognizing that there are some tools a decent political movement should not use, because once those tools become legitimate, no one can control who uses them next.
The American constitutional system was designed with ambition counteracting ambition. But ambition does not counteract ambition if Congress becomes an extension of the president, if party loyalty overwhelms institutional duty, if courts avoid hard questions, and if voters reward abuses because they are aimed at their favorite targets.
The result is not strong government. It is government by retaliation.
A healthy political system needs more than written rules. It needs officeholders who accept that victory is temporary, legitimacy matters, opponents are not enemies of the state, and power borrowed from weakened institutions must eventually be repaid—with interest.
That is the warning Republicans should hear now.
The damage they tolerate because it benefits them today may become the weapon used against them tomorrow. The constitutional shortcuts they excuse now may be used by someone they fear far more than the current Democratic leadership. The presidency they are helping to reconstruct around personal loyalty and unchecked discretion will not always be occupied by their champion.
