In what Politico describes as part of a “broader Democratic effort to conduct oversight over the Trump administration amid the pandemic,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer announced this week that he wanted to make it illegal for the president to be any better at politics than the Democrats are.

In a Sunday statement, Schumer introduced the “No PR Act,” which (per Politico) “would prohibit the use of federal dollars toward any material that promotes the names or signatures of Trump or Vice President Mike Pence.”

The measure is an attempt to prevent President Trump from doing things like ordering the Treasury Department to put his name on each check mailed to Americans as part of last month’s economic aid package. (The president had wanted to sign the checks himself, but current law made that impossible, and he settled for attaching his signature to letters mailed to people informing them that their aid money had been direct deposited.)

Various Democrats and their allies in the press found this shocking, bordering on scandalous. As Schumer’s statement puts it: “The No PR Act puts an end to the president’s exploitation of taxpayer money for promotional material that only benefits his re-election campaign.”

The law would, in effect, force the president to operate under the same constraints that Democrats impose on themselves. As last year came to an end, I recalled the story of Barack Obama’s invisible tax cut. Early in his first term, Democrats passed one of the broadest tax cuts in years, cutting payroll taxes for the overwhelming majority of working Americans. They also intentionally kept this a secret, because the administration’s economists told them that would be better—savvier—than simply cutting everyone a check, as George W. Bush had already done a few years earlier.