With a clear majority in both Houses of the US Congress, Republicans face a difficult choice about whether to compromise with President Barack Obama on a series of issues.
Obama has already made it clear that he will not wait for their decision. Instead, he will spend his final two years in office exploring the frontiers of executive power.
Last week brought two expressions of this new posture: The secretly negotiated agreement on emissions that Obama announced with Chinese President Xi Jinping and a statement on net neutrality that advocated regulating internet service providers as “common carriers”.
Today, the president is expected to move ahead on a third, more politically volatile issue of allowing millions of illegal residents to stay and work legally in the US. The first announcement provoked Republican catcalls. The second made them howl. The third is rendering them apoplectic. At the extreme end, Arizona congressman Matt Salmon said the amnesty plan would be an “impeachable offence”.
Obama’s rationale for taking matters into his own hands is that all three are issues on which the GOP majority has refused to act.
On climate change, House Republicans used Chinese inaction as a pretext for doing nothing themselves. On net neutrality, they declined to give the Federal Communications Commission the authority to prevent companies from creating fast and slow lanes on the internet. On immigration, they blocked comprehensive reform that would address the status of 12 million undocumented long-term residents.
Presidential systems produce executive-legislative conflict by their nature — see Latin America. Democrats, who dominated the legislative branch between the 1950s and the 1990s, have historically been the most opposed to unilateral action by the executive branch. At the end of the Nixon years, the liberal historian Arthur Schlesinger decried the rise of an “imperial presidency”, with its expanding zones of secrecy. Through the Reagan years, Democrats opposed unapproved covert action and demanded respect for Congress’s constitutional power to declare war.
After September 11, they again complained about George W Bush’s broad claims of authority around national security and his practice of appending secret signing statements to legislation he did not like.
Now the shoe is on the other foot. It is the Republicans who dominate Congress, whereas Democrats hold the White House and hope that Hillary Clinton will retain it for them in 2016. A more powerful presidency that can navigate around congressional obstinacy is in their interest. This logic has finally persuaded a liberal president whose previous job was teaching Constitutional Law.
As recently as last year, Obama said he lacked the legal authority to do what he now proposes on immigration. “I’m not the emperor of the United States,” Obama said. “My job is to execute laws that are passed.”
The president’s recent actions stand in contrast to those of Bill Clinton, who, after losing control of Congress in 1994, pursued micro-initiatives calculated to show his relevance without upsetting anyone. Obama is invoking expanded authority on issues that do matter and Congress is already reacting. There is talk again of shutting down the government and of holding presidential appointments hostage.
However, those steps will highlight the system’s current dysfunction. A smarter way to respond would be for Congress finally to pass legislation on the issues in question. Sending the president bills on climate change, net neutrality and immigration — even bills he may veto — will undermine Obama’s case for acting on his own.
— Financial Times
Jacob Weisberg is chairman and editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.
