Shortly after his inauguration, President Donald Trump hastily arranged a press conference to take place in the Oval Office. In front of the entire world, the new president signed the first in a series of executive orders reversing or curtailing executive orders issued by President Barack Obama on a variety of issues.
While Mr. Obama famously remarked that he did not need the cooperation of Congress and could unilaterally govern so long as he had a “pen and a phone,” Mr. Trump’s first official action presumably signals a deep respect for the traditional understanding of the limits of presidential power. As if signed with disappearing ink, many of Mr. Obama’s most controversial executive orders will now magically disappear from federal law.
Presidents do not legislate (or at least they are not supposed to) and laws must not be created without Congress. To do so is constitutionally dubious and politically imprudent. And so long as Mr. Trump does not resort to Mr. Obama’s short-sighted abuse of executive authority when he and Congress fail to agree on some future issue, we can expect to see the executive/legislative balance restored. While it may be convenient, not to mention tempting, for Mr. Trump to bypass Congress, it is better to suffer a substantial policy defeat than to bend the rule of law.
Mr. Obama’s prolific use of executive orders to circumvent Congress’s role in the law-making process not only disrupted the constitutional balance between the White House and Congress, but it destabilized the public’s perception and understanding of federal law. Executive orders have the force of law, but they lack any staying power because they can be overturned just as easily as they were enacted. Such a toggle — where something is made law in one instance, yet abrogated in the next without any debate — causes confusion and instability.
Moreover, the overuse of executive orders diminishes the need for compromise and increases discord among neighbors. We are an increasingly divided nation, and the power of the presidency to exacerbate this divide became apparent when Mr. Obama used executive orders to settle controversial social issues, including, among others, amnesty for illegal aliens, cap-and-trade regulations, transgender bathroom rights, and gun control.
By sidestepping Congress, and using the bully-pulpit of the White House to label his detractors as mere intransigents and nay-sayers, Mr. Obama repeatedly shut down the debate and awarded the trophy to his side. How could he and his supporters fail to see the bitterness they would reap and the ephemerality of the results?
Part of the problem was that American liberals have long believed that they are on the “winning side of history” and that Mr. Obama’s executive orders were definitive triumphs of progress over the unfounded objections of unsophisticated, non-coastal, working-class citizens. It was an unmitigated display of arrogance.
Pundits, analysts, and the entire political left have repeatedly asked how Mr. Trump could have been elected in this golden age of “Progress”; but the answer, in part, is not surprising:
(1) Mr. Trump appealed to the average American voter and their needs, while liberal activists took them for granted and pandered to urban elites; and (2) Mr. Obama’s excessive reach into the lives of everyday Americans through his unapologetic use of executive orders stoked a populist revolt.
Our Founding Fathers would not live under the yoke of a foreign government that gave them little say in the direction of national affairs, so why should the hard-working farmer in Iowa tolerate similar circumstances more than two centuries later?
Mr. Trump’s election was a clear rebuke to the notion that Washington D.C., New York, and Los Angeles are the centers of American power. Instead, Mr. Trump gave voice to the Wisconsin dairy farmer, the mechanic in Ohio, and the factory worker in Michigan. The voters who delivered Mr. Trump the White House were tired of a president who felt entitled to lecture average Americans on the way they should live and who sneered at them when they objected. They were tired of being told they were the redneck denizens of fly-over states; tired of being told that establishment elites were the only ones entitled to a say in the direction of our country; tired of being told they were unenlightened sexists, racists, or homophobes because they were not actively engaged in progressive activism. They were tired of a president who had little respect for their views and trampled the legislative process when it was politically expedient.
So while the establishment left has spent the last eight years celebrating Mr. Obama’s victories on behalf of fashionable, progressive causes, in the end, these victories will be hollow because Mr. Obama failed to achieve many of them without the cooperation of Congress and the deliberation such approval demanded. Mr. Trump should do everything in his power to avoid the same mistake.
