Trump dyes diesel exempt without Congress, then floats a gas tax cut only Congress can grant.

…(cont) Two days later, on September 25th, the Campaign Legal Center filed a different complaint. It accused the president of personally directing spending from MAGA Inc., a four-hundred-million-dollar political war chest, calling the arrangement a "clear-cut violation" of the law that is supposed to keep a super PAC's money outside any one official's hands. The export-ban warning and the war-chest complaint landed two days apart in the same month, and they share a shape: money and fuel both moving without the committee, the vote, or the statute that normally sits between a president and a dollar.

This week the White House signed an order expanding the tax exemption for red-dye diesel, fuel marked off the road tax because it is meant for tractors, generators, and construction equipment. Reporting on the order found most of what it newly covers was already exempt before the president signed anything. Run the filing against the table: the order changes a dye, not a price.

On Tuesday the president went further, asked whether he would suspend the federal gas tax outright. "We're thinking about that," he said. Four states had already cut their own gas taxes ahead of the midterms, acting on authority that is entirely theirs. The federal tax is not. It is set by statute, and only Congress can suspend a statute — the same Congress whose hand on a war chest a watchdog says the president has already treated as optional.

That is the gap the reconciling desk keeps finding the same size it was in September: between weighing something and doing it, between a dye and a price, between a tax only Congress can lift and a president who has spent the month finding out which taxes don't need Congress at all, hon.