In an article at Brookings Elaine Kamarck points out how brittle Barack Obama’s legacy is:
It becomes clearer every day that Barack Obama, a historic president, presided over a somewhat less than historic presidency. With only one major legislative achievement (Obamacare)—and a fragile one at that—the legacy of Obama’s presidency mainly rests on its tremendous symbolic importance and the fate of a patchwork of executive actions.
How much of that was due to fate and how much was due to Obama’s own shortcomings as a politician is up for debate and is a question that emerges from Princeton historian Julian Zelizer’s new edited volume, The Presidency of Barack Obama.
With contributions from seventeen historians, the book bills itself as “a first historical assessment†of the Obama presidency. The overwhelming consensus, Zelizer writes, is that Obama “turned out to be a very effective policymaker but not a tremendously successful party builder.†This “defining paradox of Obama’s presidency†comes up again and again: the historians, by and large, approve of Obama’s policies (although some find them too timid) while they lament his politics.
Government-by-presidential-edict is specifically Cass Sunstein’s contribution to American politics. He championed it before Obama’s presidency and again once Obama took office.
Our system was intentionally constructed to have a strong Congress and a weak presidency. Although ruling by executive order may provide a temporary solution to a problem, it’s only good until the next presidency or until exigent circumstances makes the president change his or her mind.
Don’t imagine that permanent single party rule will change that. There is no such thing as a permanent majority, not by a party and certainly not by a faction of a party.
These executive orders don’t work to the advantage of the American people and they don’t work to the advantage of the president. They allow the Congress to avoid doing what they were hired to do: make commitments. By avoiding commitments they avoid accountability and, consequently, blame.
I don’t know how this situation can be rectified—any solution requires the acquiescence of Congress and the incumbents like the status quo just fine.
“Although the ruling by executive order may provide a temporary solution to a problem, it’s only good until the next presidency or until exigent circumstances makes the president change his or her mind.”
We are discovering that reality may be different. Attempted reversals of Pres. Obama’s Executive actions have been met with lawsuits and so far the Trump administration is dealing with those poorly.
I think it’s too early to tell what Pres. Obama’s legacy will be beyond being the first black President.
One of the things that strikes me about government at all levels these days is that everybody wants to do somebody else’s job and nobody wants to do their own. Making law is the job of the Congress; interpreting law that of the judiciary (at least now it is); disciplining the lower courts the job of the Supreme Court.
IMO the courts doing the overruling are usurpers. They should be harshly disciplined. That’s not to say that I agree with all of the executive orders. I just think that they, too, are usurpations.
I largely agree – the system isn’t working the way it’s supposed to. Expediency is the norm and, over time, it sets a new standard for acceptable action and behavior.
In the face of this, a non-trivial number of people want to centralize even more power which will make all the existing problems that much worse and make expediency much more attractive.