Yesterday, we had the Washington Post being all concerned with too much executive action. But, only if Trump wins. Not really that Obama has gone hog wild with them. Today, James Surowiecki at the New Yorker is a bit concerned
THE PERILS OF EXECUTIVE ACTION
Obama used the power of the pen to make policy. What would Trump do?
Huh. Nothing on what Hillary would do? Anyhow, it does start out with Obama’s increased unilateral power grab (which is defended later in the article), then we get
Donald Trump has made it clear that he sees Obama as having “led the way†in using executive action aggressively and that, if elected, he intends to do the same. “I’m going to do a lot of right things,†he has said, and he’s pledged to reverse many of Obama’s executive orders and memorandums “within two minutes†of taking office. Most concretely, he has promised to use his power to restrict entry to the U.S. in order to curb immigration from any country “compromised by terrorism.†In Trump’s view, that includes Germany and France. He’s also likely to step up deportation of undocumented immigrants, resurrect the Keystone XL pipeline, declare China a currency manipulator, and reopen coal leases on federal land.
Not everything Obama has done with his executive power will be as easy for Trump to overturn. Regulations that have gone through a formal rulemaking process, such as the Clean Power Plan, typically can’t just be discarded by a new incumbent. That’s why Obama’s executive agencies, like those of his predecessors, spent the final year of the Administration hurriedly initiating a host of regulatory proposals—so that the proposals could make it through the rulemaking process before Obama leaves office.
Still, were Trump to win, many of Obama’s accomplishments would be under threat. Even rules that can’t be rescinded can be left unenforced. Trump, who says that global warming is “bullshit,†has vowed to cancel the Paris Agreement. Technically, he can’t, but the deal has no enforcement mechanism, so he’d be free to just ignore the Paris goals and do nothing about greenhouse-gas emissions. And what Trump can’t reverse with his pen he can mitigate with executive-branch appointments, as Ronald Reagan did when he named the rabid anti-environmentalist James Watt to head the Department of the Interior.
And there’s the rub of the matter: what Democrats are really upset over is that Trump could use executive actions to roll back Obama’s big government actions, along with simply refusing to enforce previous rule making. They don’t care whether Hillary would continue to use lots of unilateral executive actions, because they would be helpful to their cause.
Random thought: I will never understand why Progressives/Statists/Democrats think increasing the power of the central government, along with the President and the Executive Branch, is a good idea. They never stop to think that all the negative aspects will effect themselves. They think it’s all lollipops and unicorns, and the Bad Things will happen to Other People.
