Rich and Co., on today’s edition of The Editors, take a firm stance on Trump’s call to close the Department of Education.

“The president of the United States cannot end or abolish the Department of Education without Congress’s permission,” says Charlie. “And he also can’t effectively end it. He can’t fire every single member of staff and empty out the building and decline to send out any of the money and so on and so forth. This position, unfortunately, was created by Congress in the late 1970s. . . . And it’s been reauthorized.

“Where there are laws with all manner of latitude written into them — ‘the president shall, the secretary shall, in the view of the agency’ or what you will — he can make those calls in the same way as have all of his predecessors. But he can’t end it.”

“It seems to me that there’s an issue of putting the cart before the horse here,” says Phil, “which is that normally what happens is presidents try to get stuff through Congress. If they can’t, then they try to think, ‘Is there a creative way to do it through executive action?’ Now, sometimes the executive actions, as we’ve seen many times, have gone too far in trying to usurp and bypass Congress.”

Phil outlines some possible ways Trump could approach this issue, but concludes by pointing out that one can’t “suddenly say, ‘Well, we don’t want there to be a Department of Education, even though that was approved by Congress and has continuously received appropriations.'”

The Editors podcast is recorded on Tuesdays and Fridays every week and is available wherever you listen to podcasts.