“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
“Stop Complaining About Obama’s Golfing”: It’s Not About Optics, It’s About Doing Your Job
Of course, Obama is hardly the first president to vacation – President John Adams took an amazing eight months off in one year in office, and President John F. Kennedy went away almost every single weekend of his presidency. And Obama’s not the first president to get criticized for it either. President Ronald Reagan, who was on vacation for more than 300 days of his presidency, took an incredible amount of heat for not coming rushing back to the White House after the death of two Marines in Lebanon, an attack that would lead to the 1984 bombing of the Marine barracks there. But he blew off the criticism and even campaigned for two days before returning to Washington.
We don’t let our son watch the news anymore. Growing up with parents who are big consumers of news, my boy—at the ripe old age of three—already knows something is amiss if Diane Sawyer is taking a night off. If David Muir is at the anchor desk he has been known to ask, “Is Diane sick?” (We haven’t started explaining the more permanent transition going on at ABC just yet because we don’t know how he will take it.)
But between Ferguson, ISIS, Gaza, Ukraine, Ebola and every other tragic news story happening, there are too many questions that newscasts raise now that a three-year old shouldn’t have to wonder about. Too many sad faces on the screen, and it’s too soon to explain why.
Being president of the United States means engaging on all of those issues every day, often multiple times – whether you’re on vacation or you’re not. And regardless of the location, this president – like every occupant of the Oval Office before him – is making decisions based on the welfare of the nation, far ahead of what his vacation schedule is.
Something unspeakable happened to James Foley, and his grieving family lives with the tragedy created by the ruthless monsters who took him from them. I can’t say how I’d react if someone took my son from me in the same way. No one can know who hasn’t gone through such a horrible thing. But I can guess. My guess is that I’d want the entire world to stop. That I’d want a moment of silence that never ended. I would want people to stop laughing and businesses to close. I have no judgment for the impulse of any American who feels any hint of that sadness at Foley’s loss.
But I have little patience, and our country has little need for, the people who play politics with his life. One mindless commentator tweeted that people who share my view support golfing while Americans are being beheaded. The New York Times wrote that the president was “seemingly able to put the savagery out of his mind,” as he went on to continue his vacation with his family and his friends after addressing the incredible tragedy.
I’m not sure why the New York Times thinks it can read minds, but knowing this president, I know one thing with great clarity: The savagery of those who attack Americans is never far from his mind. This notion that he can detach is mostly wrong. For the man who gave the green light to take out Osama bin Laden and is often first to hear the reports of American servicemen and women who die in missions that he ordered, the savagery of this world is not far from the forefront of his mind at every moment of the day.
I don’t remember, but I assume that I was one of the many Democrats who gleefully took shots at President George W. Bush for the time he spent at Crawford—and if so I regret it. Presidents are better for having time out of Washington, even better for time away with their families.
Whether you’re a partisan or a cynical reporter who has been making the same critique about presidential vacations for decades, I assume you probably agree that human beings function better when they get a little time away. I wouldn’t want my surgeon to be some woman who hasn’t had a break in 4 years. I wouldn’t want to share the road with a truck driver who hasn’t had enough sleep. It doesn’t matter what your occupation is; you will do your job better if you recharge your batteries. And even though the president is never really on vacation, giving him at least a little downtime is good for all of us.
In the end, it’s not about the optics. It’s about doing your job. And if the president is doing his – which he is – we should all be able to appreciate the fact that he is taking the opportunity to be a dad, a husband and even a leader of the free world who can clear his head on the golf course.
By: Bill Burton, Executive Vice President at Global Strategy Group; Politico, August 25, 2014
“A Conversion On Political Rhetoric”: The Fascinating Political Evolution Of Paul Ryan
Paul Ryan’s new book The Way Forward is meant to be bought, not read.
You buy a book like this because you’re in a conservative book club, or you’re a big Paul Ryan fan, and you feel obliged. It’s like voting, but it costs money. Publishers commission these books hoping to get a big payoff if and when the author is nominated for president and suddenly a much larger share of the country feels obliged to vote, er, buy Ryan.
But there’s more to The Way Forward than that, largely because Ryan is an increasingly important and intriguing figure in Republican politics. His persona evolves — often, it seems — in tandem with the felt-needs of the GOP. Ryan has always been a little further to the right than the average elected Republican. But that didn’t stop him from corralling votes for Medicare Part-D when George W. Bush needed them. Then when the GOP constituents needed someone who looked good under a green eyeshade, he became a much sterner budget watcher, and strenuous fiscal conservative.
The first half of the Ryan book is a biography as starched and colorless as his collars. But the second half of The Way Forward is fascinating. It gives a view of what Ryan wants to be now and over the next two years, possibly as he contemplates a run for the presidency. And make no mistake: Ryan is transformed.
No longer is Paul Ryan the P90X-ripping, budget-slashing devotee of Ayn Rand that Democrats gleefully caricatured as someone who wanted to push grandma off a cliff. Today he’s the geeky white guy dancing badly at a black church, and then biting his lip and nodding to signal how much he is listening, and learning. He’s putting in an effort to expand his horizons personally. He is undergoing a political conversion, or at least a conversion on political rhetoric.
Quite literally, Paul Ryan experiences a kind of Come-To-Frank-Luntz moment when someone asks him who he is talking about when he refers to some people as “takers.” Ryan had in the past adopted the language of “makers and takers” to describe people who are paying more in taxes than they receive in benefits, and people who are receiving more benefits than what they pay. Ryan says this language was just in the air at the time he adopted it. And it was. A Nation of Takers was the scorching title to a sobering (and sober) book by Nicholas Eberstadt about the shape of America’s entitlement state. Eberstadt’s book is exactly the kind of doomsday look into the spreadsheets that Ryan was getting into then.
Today, Ryan won’t disavow the math, exactly, but he has discarded the implied insult he attached to it.
[W]hile the problem it depicts is real and worrisome, the phrase “makers and takers” communicated a lot more than just the dilemma I was trying to describe. That day at the fair was the first time I really heard the way it sounded. As I stood there, listening to the guy from the Democrats’ tent lay into me, I thought, “Holy cow. He’s right.” [The Way Forward]
Ryan also talks about his experiences of reaching out to constituencies where there aren’t many Republicans. In what is probably the most substantive political point in the book, Ryan says what many already suspect, that the 2012 election proved that “focusing heavily on simply turning out our traditional coalition is a losing strategy.”
Ryan does what a politician in this position should do — he takes his lumps just by showing up for constituent events among people who are not naturally aligned to him. Black constituents often tell him to his face that they disagree with him. “[A]t least they were telling me, personally, instead of just some pollster canvassing the neighborhood,” he writes. He says that these events communicate that a person who has conservative politics can still care enough to show up and talk to minority constituents.
This is the right thing politically, but it’s also the right thing to do, period. The GOP should follow Ryan’s example. It would be good for the country. Citizens deserve the competition for their votes that gerrymandering and polarization deny. No major party should effectively ignore an entire demographic or geographic group of Americans.
Now, there are no great revelations in this book. It’s filled with easy-to-understand anecdotes about the malfunctioning of the health-care system before and after ObamaCare, and the efficiency of market-oriented solutions. These will be repeated many, many times by Ryan in the medium-term of his political life.
Ryan also repeats Jack Kemp’s name over and over again, almost as much as he does Reagan’s. Kemp was a Republican who worked hard to make GOP principles appealing to urban and minority voters. He was HUD secretary under George H.W. Bush and Bob Dole’s vice presidential candidate. Kemp is an odd figure, combining the supply-side politics of a Dan Quayle with the social idealism of a George Romney. He referred to himself as a “bleeding-heart conservative.”
And a bleeding-heart conservative sounds great in theory. In a way, it’s what George W. Bush attempted with his “compassionate conservative” brand. But Kemp was never really a national figure, and his unique policy ideas never really got purchase among their supposed beneficiaries. He was admired more than followed. He made Republicans feel better about themselves, without winning great victories. Maybe the time is ripe for a return to Kempism. But I have my doubts.
By: Michael Brendan Dougherty, The Week, August 21, 2014
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