I think that Daniel Henninger’s Wall Street Journal column on the president’s “creeping authoritarianism” is overwrought:
Every president since George Washington has felt frustration with the American system’s impediments to change. This president is done with Congress.
The political left, historically inclined by ideological belief to public policy that is imposed rather than legislated, will support Mr. Obama’s expansion of authority. The rest of us should not.
The U.S. has a system of checks and balances. Mr. Obama is rebalancing the system toward a national-leader model that is alien to the American tradition.
In my view President Obama suffers more than his predecessors have from a distinctively oppositionist Congress. However, I don’t think his problems stop there. I think that this president more than others of my memory really doesn’t like to be second-guessed. My impression is that he thinks that Congress should take his ideas, flesh them out, and enact them into legislation. Our government has never worked that way so why not now?
I also think that President Obama doesn’t have much interest in or patience with the mechanics of getting legislation passed.
However, even without “creeping authoritarianism” there’s a lot the president can do that would be well within his constitutional powers and neatly within the practices of prior presidents. The Pentagon would be a very good place to start.
I’ve been sympathetic to Obama and think he really did try at one time to get Congress to work with him. I think the GOP has tried, and succeeded, in taking nominally Republican policies like the ACA and somehow used them to vilify a President that they seem to have finally been convinced is actually a citizen of this country.
But his recent economic road trip just has me shaking my head. Does he think that any of these policies will be passed by Congress?
I have a friend with a dog that knew – and responded – to the word ‘treat.’ Then she kept on using the word ‘treat’ to get the dog to look up for photos, without actually having a treat. Now the dog ignores the word as meaningless noise. That’s how I’m starting to feel about this Administration and “help/jobs for the middle class.”
TimH:
I don’t think that appointing Rahm Emanuel as Chief of Staff, “Elections have consequences. We won.”, or refusing to meet with Republican Congressional leaders during the transition or for the first six months of his presidency was exactly setting the stage for a cordial relationship with Congress. On the other hand “Defeating Obama is our highest priority” wasn’t building any bridges, either. My interpretation is that a president and Republican Congressional leadership at daggers drawn was the situation at least from election day forward. No “trying to get Congress to work with him”.
“You have drinks with him” (about Mitch McConnell) may be good for a laugh but politics is a business of relationships not a matter of the president proposing his plans and the Congress dutifully passing them. It takes work.
Rhetorical excesses aside, I think the gist of the piece is correct. This Administration seems uniquely willing to push the powers of the administrative state, which I think is the main reason it has received so many 9-0 smackdowns from the SCOTUS. It could be that these actions are a response to legislative inaction, but that cannot be the whole of it. It takes a few years to get a case to the Supreme Court, and I think many of them can probably be traced to the first two yeas of the Presidency, when Democrats had a strong majority in the House and 60 votes in the Senate.
Since most of the regulatory overreach is reviewable by the courts, and indeed, Obama’s overreach has resulted in the SCOTUS expanding judicial review, the system will correct. There are two harms: (1) regulatory uncertainty from taking positions to which the regulatory compliance will either be complete, partial or zero; and (2) legislative distrust. Telling the country you will use regulations or guidance to create new programs that surprise legislators makes legislators less likely to pass laws without being completely sure that the executive’s power is constrained from any future surprises. Its not simply a partisan complaint either (though partisans have the most interest in articulating it), a consistent aspect of a “seperation of powers” system is that the legislators draft laws with the understanding that they are doing so with respect to not just the current President, but whomever holds the office in the future.
I have been a fan of Daniel Henninger, finding his columns to be less hysterical than they are blunt, when giving his conservative-based POV about politics, monetary policies etc.
In reading the article posted, Henninger supports his ‘creeping authoritarianism” suppositions with examples of Obama’s repeated rhetorical obfuscations and distortions in the past. Whether it was dealing with class warfare, in 1% versus 99% phase, prior to the 2012 election, to now, when he is redundantly being flippant, in deeming issues he once declared as ‘important’ (Benghazi) and were going to be seriously looked into (The IRS), to now being phoney and a distraction from economic concerns, Obama weaves and bobs to change public opinion, rather than actively and openly face and address real problems.
More people other than Henninger have inferred Obama’s tendency to conveniently swerve to economical issues when the political pot begins to boil over with controversy. And, once the press and public begin to settle down, he leaves the economy to fend for itself, and resumes hammering away at transforming the social agenda of this country.
I also think Henninger makes valid points about Obama stretching his executive power to far boundaries of what has been done in the past, and beyond: his sly-of-hand appointment of people to the NLRB, which was later overturned by the counts; the unilateral changes made to the Welfare Reform Act; the circumvention of Congress dealing with another rendition of the Dream Act; stonewalling the F&F investigation of Eric Holder by his EO; and recently his single-handed, year’s extension of the ACA mandate for business, just to name a few.
Furthermore, Obama’s words of conciliation and cooperation with Congress just doesn’t match his actions. Woodward’s book described this President as one who even isolated himself from his own party, let alone the opposition. Obama, like most presidents, lives in a bubble — his, though, is made of tempered, triple glazed glass, making his world far more insulated from the outside, reserving his attention and decision-making primarily to the inner circle of advisors.
And, I think what Henninger was cautiously pessimistic about was how frequently Obama seems to be ignoring and going around the checks and balances of his own powers in order to achieve his own vision without battle from his opponents. This may be hailed by his supporters as a great remedy to delete republican obstructionism. But, looking down the road it sets a worrisome precedent in establishing more and more of an authoritarian rule at the top — something that can shift either to the right or left in the future.
and
Mr. Heninnger does not understand the system of checks and balances which he writes about. That’s the charitable explanation. The uncharitable explanation is that he’s cloaking a partisan argument with the mantle of “checks and balances” to make it sound more reasonable.
If the President is, in reality, “rebalancing” the system then that is because the other branches are not performing their duty to restrain the executive which is something he completely fails to mention in his attack on the President.
I think the op-ed was pretty much on target regarding the Preident’s inclinations toward creeping authoritarianism- my comment is that this is a thoroughly bipartisan phenomenon that Mr. Obama shares with no small percentage of his Republican critics.
I would also second Dave’s comment regarding the President’s lack of patience and for lack of a better word, arrogance. His recent treatment of a freshman Democratic Congressman, basically smacking him down in front of a large group of MoC peers, is not something would have seen from Richard Nixon, much less a president like Clinton, Carter or LBJ. Presidents have often been scathing in private discussions but rarely do they get casually nasty over trivialities in a group setting because members of Congress tend to have long memories. It is certainly not treatment Senator Obama would have taken lightly from President Bush.
Ok, forced myself to read a WSJ op-ed again. WHen Obama says this, it is supposed to be authoritarian? Really?
“That means whatever executive authority I have to help the middle class, I’ll use it.”
The Senate uses its authority. Same for Congress. He shouldnt use what executive authority he has? Why? If he uses executive authority, as is authorized in the Constitution, how is that authoritarian?
And just exactly what authoritarian things is Obama doing? Not one example. Delaying the mandate? On his own bill? Oy.
Steve
And just exactly what authoritarian things is Obama doing? Not one example. Delaying the mandate? On his own bill? Oy.
If the President is, in reality, “rebalancing†the system then that is because the other branches are not performing their duty to restrain the executive which is something he completely fails to mention in his attack on the President.
I actually think you may be right, Andy, about the other branches — they are disjointed and conflicted in their role as opposition party, and have consequently become more impotent in exercising such restraint.
As I recall, during the greatly maligned GWB 8-year term, the MSM, the democratically-controlled branches of Congress all were on megaphones making fun of and criticizing the besieged republican President. He in turn didn’t often return the jabs, going on road trips to diminish his political/ideological foes, like Obama is inclined to do. In not returning the fire, in such derisive, corrosive ways, the Congress actually was able to stay above the fray more, maintaining a higher functioning oppositional role to deflect and control any overzealous presidential overreach.
However, under the continuous loop of rhetorical trash Obama throws at Congress, including the minimal face-to-face interaction he ever has with them, the current Congress (especially the House, the only branch of Congress under R control during Obama’s term of office) has been demoted, demeaned, becoming more polarized than ever, literally paralyzed in getting anything done — something, BTW, Obama promised to reverse, but has instead propagated under his governance. It’s, nonetheless, been an effective tactic to push his frayed agenda forward, as ideological fans follow his lead, cheer him on, and show nothing but disrespect and anger for any ‘checks and balance’ actions that are imposed by the republican House for policies they see as abusive, fiscally leeching from the economy, power-hungry, and/or setting bad precedents for future administrations. In fact, such push-back is now flavored as negative “obstructionism,’ by the president and his cronies, rather than a healthy demonstration of ‘checks and balances.’
Basically, our country’s safeguards are diminishing in front of our eyes, and apparently with our somewhat ignorant permission.
So, let me see if I understand this. It’s Obama’s fault that, for instance, the House passed the Ryan budget, but when it came time to write the THUD appropriations in the light of that budget, the self-same GOP members who voted for the budget balked, shrieking, “Jesus we can’t do that. Those cuts are way too deep” — and thus the GOP leadership pulled the bill off the floor. Or to take another example, to great fanfare, the Speaker introduced last year his so-called Plan B bill to avoid the sequestration. However, when the Tea Party faction reviewed the bill, it had a shitfit, and it, too, was pulled (Boehner: “it did not have sufficient support from our members to pass”). Examples of GOP fuckupery can be multiplied. But you would have us believe that all this is due to “the continuous loop of rhetorical trash…blah, blah, blah.” Right.
You are a truly, truly, truly stupid person.
I googled the WSJ and signing statements. Went through the first few pages of responses. The only thing I found was an article noting that Obama was also using them. What should be noted was Bush using them 160 compared with Obama’s 20.
So, we have the WSJ upset that Obama might be doing something, vs a prior admin that set the record in the number of times it actively tried to circumvent laws passed by Congress. But, this admin is the increasingly authoritarian one.
Steve
@steve, signing statements have been used since James Monroe, there is no inherent problem with them. Some signing statements merely voice protest, but agree to uphold the law. Some (like the one by Monroe) state that the law appears unclear as to whether it is constitutional, I will interpret and enforce it in a way that avoid the Constitutional objection. This shouldn’t be objectionable most of the time, since it is the President’s job, when faced with legislation with multiple possible interpretations, to adopt the Constitutional one.
A perennial source of conlict stems from the fact that the President has certain powers from the Constitution that do not derive from legislation passed by Congress, particularly in areas of foreign policy and war. One of Bush II’s signing statements was on legislation requiring U.S. passports to recognize Jerusalem as under Israeli sovereignty; Bush wrote “U.S. policy regarding Jerusalem has not changed.” When U.S. policy changes, the President, whomever he or she is, will faithfully execute that law, but the Congress doesn’t get to control foreign policy or usurp the executive power of recognition.
If someone wants to see a pretty good list of the indictment against the Obama administration, I think Cantors provides the complete picture:
http://majorityleader.gov/TheImperialPresidency/#govt-waiver
I don’t necessarily agree with everything listed, esp. the Jerusalem bit. I also think its quite probable that many or most of the complaints are about things that stem from lower level administrative agencies and are not the work of a would-be dictator. Obama may have set a tone, and he should fire whomever in the A.G.’s office who is overseeing which court fights should be picked.
But PD is that list dishonest as regards the health care waivers?
Cantor:
The clear implication is that the waivers were granted in perpetuity. But that is false.
The Hill, HHS finalizes over 1,200 waivers under healthcare reform law:
Sorry about the bad formatting. The Hill’s quote ends at “HHs denied…”
Jan,
So the President, through the force of his rhetoric, has made the Congress impotent? That’s pretty much the same argument Henninger makes. In truth the Congress sleeps in its own bed and its failings belong to the Congress, the People and no one else.
sam, I don’t think he is implying the waivers are in perpetuity, he is arguing that the waivers were granted arbitrarily to an extremely large number of applicants, but not all, and implying that this decision was corrupt either because those selected were politically connected or those denied were not. I assume he has no direct information of his implication, but assuming there were no pre-existing principles for issuing the waivers, the process was flawed and rife for abuse or at least the appearance of it. In my experience, agency personnel don’t like this sort of thing because they get second-guessed and get their reputations sullied. They like to be able to say “I’m just following the law.” This is either Congress’ or HHS’ fault for not establishing pre-existing principles to govern discretionary action.
And no, the HHS waivers don’t bother me much, but best practices don’t appear to have been used.
Well, PD, you and I read this differently:
“Yet there are another 1,019,810 Americans who are covered by health plans that were either denied a waiver or were unable to successfully navigate the waiver process. Their health care plans will be required to comply with the costly mandates. [My emphasis]”
All health plans will have to comply in 2014.
PD- The waivers were built into the ACA. They knew that until the subsidies came on board in 2014, it could cause hardships for some groups. The list of those granted waivers has been gone over extensively several times. There is no evidence of political favoritism. Nearly everyone who applied got one. Of the other things Cantor lists, the IPAB and CPFB were actually voted o and passed into law by Congress. How is that an example of Obama authoritarianism? The only thing on your list that comes close is the Innovation center.
Steve