“The True Bounds Of Executive Authority”: The Possession Of Great Power Necessarily Implies Great Responsibility
With Congress mired in gridlock, President Obama has vowed to use “a pen and a phone” to accomplish some of his policy goals. Last week, he doubled down by promising to act on one of the nation’s most divisive and important issues — immigration — before the rapidly approaching end of summer. Such executive action has outraged his political foes. To be sure, any ambitious path of executive action must be conducted in a manner consistent with the law and the appropriate role of coordinate branches. But should we snap to attention when we hear hyperventilating about his supposed abuse of power? At least so far, hardly.
All presidents have significant power to advance policy goals through executive action. That power is limited by the Constitution, above all else. The Supreme Court has made it clear that when Congress has not acted, and no federal law blocks it, the president has considerable leeway to act. Through the years, presidents of both parties have used the tools at hand. Ronald Reagan reined in regulatory agencies. Bill Clinton declared major swaths of land off limits for development, and cracked down on tobacco. George W. Bush made major moves to limit stem cell research. And presidents (including this one) have used, and often abused, executive authority when it comes to national security, often moving in secret.
Where does President Obama stack up in this hall of presidents? In fact, so far, he has not been especially more aggressive than his predecessors. He issued executive orders at a slower pace than any president since Grover Cleveland. Quantity is not quality, but the orders he has issued have not been particularly bold — no seizing steel mills (as Harry Truman did) or sending the National Guard to Little Rock (as Dwight Eisenhower did). One unilateral power clearly given to the president by the Constitution is the pardon power. Here, too, Obama has issued fewer pardons and grants of clemency to prisoners serving unjust sentences than most presidents.
This has not stopped his political opponents from screaming that he is abusing his power. The House of Representatives recently voted to sue him for one act of supposed overreaching: delays in implementing the employer mandate and other parts of the Affordable Care Act. Set aside the weirdness of such a claim (this is the same House that wants to repeal the same law). Once a bill is passed by Congress, the executive branch has the authority to execute it. Realistically, putting complex statutes such as the ACA into place will have bumps in the road. In this case, it turned out that the ACA could not be accomplished as quickly as hoped — in part because several states refused to cooperate. But presidents have delayed implementation of laws in the past without arousing ire. George W. Bush used his executive authority in 2004 to waive penalty fees for seniors who signed up late for Medicare Part D, another contentious health care law.
Will the president’s use of executive power to advance his goals on immigration reform be constitutional? Depends. No president has authority to do a complete immigration overhaul by fiat. And we don’t fully know what is contemplated, which must of course meet the test of legality. But this president, as any president, has ample room for action. He has asked for a set of formal recommendations from Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and has looked at expanding the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to allow for deferred deportations, at the discretion of federal prosecutors. It makes perfect sense for the president to use his finite resources in a way that is fiscally responsible and protects the public interest. Indeed, he has already done so on a smaller scale two years ago when he created DACA to ceased deportation of young immigrants who met certain criteria.
The government cannot deport everyone; it simply doesn’t have the capacity. Prioritizing deporting violent criminals is hardly earth-shattering, or Constitution-shattering. Law enforcement and prosecutors exercise discretion all the time in determining which cases to investigate and prosecute. In the real world of an “under-resourced” system, choosing how to allocate the resources that Congress does give him is clearly within the president’s purview.
Our government functions on a system of checks and balances. It’s true that the Constitution grants Congress more powers than the president. But, as William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne, said during a debate in Parliament in 1817, “the possession of great power necessarily implies great responsibility” (150 years later, Spider-Man agreed). A paralyzed Congress has abdicated its responsibility and spurred the president to act. President Obama is simply is doing what he must do to keep the United States running.
By: Inimai Chettiar, Director, Justice Program, Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law; The Hufington Post Blog, August 29, 2014
“Perish The Thought”: Rep. Peter King, Obama’s New Fashion Critic
Political commentary on President Obama’s clothing choices started almost immediately after his inauguration. Just two weeks after the president took the oath of office, Republican critics started complaining about photographs showing Obama in the Oval Office without a jacket on. Democrats responded by showing pictures of Reagan dressed in similar Oval Office attire, and the right quietly moved on.
But over the years, the complaints lingered – about the president’s jeans, the president’s neckwear, etc.
Yesterday, interest in presidential attire reached a level that was hard to believe, with the political world going a little bonkers over Obama’s tan suit. Andrew Kaczynski flagged the latest from Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) whose apoplexy about the color of the president’s suit was so over the top, it’s tempting to think this is satire.
“There’s no way any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday,” King said of President Obama on NewsMaxTV. “When you have the world watching … a week, two weeks of anticipation of what the United States is gonna do. For him to walk out – I’m not trying to be trivial here – in a light suit, light tan suit, saying that first he wants to talk about what most Americans care about the revision of second quarter numbers on the economy. This is a week after Jim Foley was beheaded and he’s trying to act like real Americans care about the economy, not about ISIS and not about terrorism. And then he goes on to say he has no strategy.”
King said Obama’s comments and actions showed “foreign policy was not a major issue” for President Obama.
Note, this isn’t a joke. Kaczynski posted the clip of King’s remarks, which seem to be entirely sincere.
An actual member of Congress – the chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee’s panel on counter-terrorism, no less – believes there’s “no way” to “excuse what the president did.” And in this case, what the president did was put on a tan suit.
I especially like the part in which King says he’s “not trying to be trivial here.” No, of course not. Perish the thought. All he’s doing is launching a tirade about the color of the president’s tan suit. Why would anyone think that’s trivial?
Also note, King was outraged by Obama’s suggestion that the economy is “what most Americans care about.” The nerve!
As for “he has no strategy,” this is pretty cheap rhetoric given the context of what the president actually said, as the congressman probably realizes.
As for the suit, I can appreciate why it raised eyebrows, at least a little. When I watched the press conference, I noticed the suit, too, and thought to myself, “Huh, that’s different.”
But then the press conference started in earnest and it was time to focus on substance. That is, unless you’re a congressman who believes there’s just no “excuse what the president did” when he put on the suit.
Postscript: White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest told reporters at the start of today’s briefing that the president ”feels pretty good” about his fashion choice, adding, “The president stands squarely behind his decision he made yesterday to wear his summer suit.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, August 29, 2014
“Something Out Of Nothing”: Obama’s ‘No Strategy’ Moment Is A Non-Story
It’s all so predictable. As expected, media pundits are having a field day dissecting President Barack Obama’s statement yesterday that, when it comes to dealing with the Islamic State (the militant group also known as ISIS), “we don’t have a strategy yet.” That sentence came in response to a journalist’s question regarding whether Obama needed Congress’ approval to go into Syria militarily, and came after an extended analysis by Obama regarding the Islamic State and the situation in Iraq and Syria.
As I suggested in this previous post prior to Obama’s press conference, the president’s caution regarding how to deal with the Islamic State is warranted, given the fluid nature of the situation in Iraq and Syria, and because there remains a great deal of uncertainty among his foreign policy experts regarding the extent to which the Islamic State presents a security threat to U.S. national interests.
For most Americans who saw Obama’s press conference in full, his candid statement explaining why his administration has not yet settled on a military strategy for dealing with the militants is likely to hardly raise an eyebrow. But for media pundits determined to extract a digestible sound byte or headline from Obama’s rather nuanced and lengthy discourse, the specific statement regarding the lack of a strategy was manna from heaven. Not surprisingly, the twitterverse exploded in consternation that the president would make such an admission, and many news outlets used Obama’s statement to lead their press conference coverage. As a result, Obama administration spokesman Josh Earnest went on the news shows to clarify that by lack of strategy, the president referred specifically to military tactics for dealing with the Islamic State, and that he in fact did have a plan for addressing broader regional concerns.
Earnest’s explanation notwithstanding, pundits were quick to assess the damage Obama’s statement would have on a) his political standing, b) the nation’s foreign policy, c) the Democrats’ chances in the upcoming midterms and d) all three. The most common media theme was that Obama’s statement reinforces the impression conveyed by recent polls that Obama is not tough enough when it comes to foreign policy, and that – as Hillary Clinton implicitly suggested in her recent Atlantic interview – Obama’s foreign policy approach lacks any underlying guiding principles. And, not least, it allowed the pundits to recycle all the previous stories about the damage done by presidential gaffes.
Here’s the problem with these instant analyses. They are wrong. Obama’s statement, by itself, will almost surely have no substantive impact on either his political standing or the effectiveness of his foreign policy. Nor will it change the outcome of the 2014 midterms. This despite the best efforts by pundits to fit this statement into a larger media narrative that will surely dominate the next few news cycles.
How do I know this? Consider some other celebrated gaffes that are even now being recycled in light of Obama’s latest statement. For example, the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake likens the “we don’t have a strategy yet” to Mitt Romney infamous 47 percent statement during the 2012 presidential campaign, in which the Republican presidential candidate claimed that “47 percent of the people ….are dependent on government” and thus would never vote for him. Blake writes, “As with all gaffes, the worst ones are the ones that confirm people’s pre-existing suspicions or fit into an easy narrative. That’s why ‘47 percent’ stung Mitt Romney so much, and it’s why ‘don’t have a strategy’ hurts Obama today.”
The problem with Blake’s analogy, however, is that despite wide-spread media coverage of Romney’s 47 percent statement, including pundits’ claims that he had essentially killed his chances to win the election, it actually had almost no impact on the outcome of the presidential race, a finding documented by political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck in their careful study of the 2012 presidential race. They conclude that, “In terms of the most important decision – who to vote for – there was no consistent evidence that much had changed” as a result of the video. Indeed, they argue that whatever its immediate impact, the video’s effect largely dissipated by the time of the first presidential debate a few weeks later and that it had no lingering influence on Romney’s support. They conclude, “Whatever the explanation, it was striking that this video, a supposed bombshell, detonated with so little apparent force in the minds of voters.”
Despite the media fixation, this will almost certainly be the case with Obama’s latest “gaffe” as well. The reason is that voters are not blank slates whose opinions toward politicians and policies are largely determined by the latest media meme of the day, no matter how pervasive the coverage. Instead, history suggests that voters’ assessment of Obama’s handling of foreign policy will be driven much more by their perceptions of events, including the Islamic State’s progress in Syria and Iraq, as mediated through voters’ own ideological predispositions, than they will by pundits’ single-minded focus on one sentence in a presidential press conference. Nor will it overshadow the more fundamental factors – the state of the economy, incumbency status and the typical seat loss experienced by the president’s party – that primarily determine midterm election outcomes.
Nonetheless, the fact that Obama’s statement will matter little to most of the public won’t stop pundits from endlessly replaying and analyzing it for the next few news cycles in the fervent, albeit misguided, belief that it may turn out to be the equivalent of “‘read my lips’ signature of a failed presidency”. That is, unless another non-story comes along in the next few days to push this one from the headlines.
By: Mathew Dickinson, Professor, Middlebury College; Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, August 29, 2014
“Shameful And Historically Illiterate”: Dear Fox News; Please Stop Using Asian Americans To Attack Black People
“Talking Points does not—does not—believe in white privilege.”
That was Fox News host Bill O’Reilly’s big, brave pitch during his third-person “talking points” segment on Tuesday’s edition of The O’Reilly Factor. The peg for the segment was the uproar and race issues surrounding the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, this month. O’Reilly was blasting the idea of people citing “white privilege” to help explain anger or inequality in a predominantly black community. He railed against a perceived failure of black leaders to spark a “cultural revolution” in their “precincts,” and the lack of personal responsibility instilled in young African Americans.
Of course Bill O’Reilly doesn’t believe that the concept of white privilege exists. (Neither does much of the rest of Fox News.) He has denied the existence of such a privilege for white Americans in previous segments, including one in which he falsely claimed that Harvard Kennedy School was requiring freshmen to take a class on the subject.
O’Reilly’s latest salvo of white-privilege denialism has already been mocked and (rightly) criticized enough. But one aspect of his crotchety monologue that was particularly unappealing was how he invoked the general economic and academic successes of Asian Americans in order to highlight the supposed failings of African Americans.
“So, do we have Asian privilege in America?” the Fox host asked rhetorically. “Because the truth is that Asian-American households earn far more money than anyone else.”
O’Reilly also compares the statistic on Asian-American children raised in single-parent households (13 percent) to that of African Americans (a “whopping” 55 percent) to make the point that Asian families in this country are stronger. This is a favorite bugaboo of O’Reilly’s, and in the past he’s even said that First Lady Michelle Obama should come on his show and tell black teens, “You stop having sex; you stop getting pregnant.”
O’Reilly has made the Asian-privilege point before. He’s also praised Asian folks by asserting that, “Asian people are not liberal, you know, by nature” because “they’re usually more industrious and hard-working.” (It’s worth noting that not all Asian demographics fit neatly into this positive stereotype that colors the way O’Reilly talks about Asian citizens.)
First, let’s be consistent and call this phenomenon “yellow privilege.” So, sure, you could reasonably argue that there is a general yellow privilege that people who look like me enjoy in the United States. For instance, Asian-American men under the age of 35 have a far lower chance of being wrongly accosted by a police officer than a young black man would. The difference is that, unlike white people, we don’t have a bitter, well-paid armada of commentators to go on TV and complain about black people every time someone brings said privilege up.
But the real reason O’Reilly’s black-yellow comparison is so annoying and intellectually dishonest is because it is patently bizarre to compare the Asian-American experience to the African-American one. Such a crass talking point—one that uses the favorable stats of one minority group to attack the culture of another—overlooks, or at least glosses over, some of the most obvious facts and tragedies in our nation’s history. Generations of Asian Americans did not endure the traumas, legacies, and residual effects of slavery, Jim Crow, and decades of racist housing policy. These are factors that O’Reilly mentions only as an aside, preferring to talk more about the importance of getting black kids to “speak properly” and behave themselves in public.
Asian Americans and African Americans have had very different experiences in America, a complicated reality that O’Reilly and many of his colleagues do not seem eager to tackle. But at least his commentary in the wake of the Michael Brown tragedy has been more refined than some of his co-workers—a thought that is less a compliment to Bill, and far more indicative of the kind of organism that Fox News has become.
By: Asawin Suebsaeg, The Daily Beast,August 27, 2014
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