Read Aloud the Text Content

This audio was created by Woord's Text to Speech service by content creators from all around the world.

Text Content or SSML code:

The White House sent out word that up till now President Obama has humbly tried to work through Congress, but Congress has balked, and so now he is going to wield his executive authority like Thor's hammer. The truth is nearly the opposite. President Obama's domestic agenda going forward looks modest, while in the past five years he has fired off nearly as many executive orders per year as George W. Bush. Without congressional authority, he invaded Libya, blasted suspected terrorists with drones, immunized groups of illegal immigrants from the law, initiated greenhouse gas regulation, authorized N.S.A. spying programs and much else. None of this was but Congress did not participate in the policy making. ― Unilateral presidential action in foreign relations - - aside from initial decisions to launch major wars and certain kinds of treaty making - has been the norm for at least a century. Unilateral presidential action in domestic regulation started in the New Deal under FDR. Congress grants enormous discretionary authority to the executive to set policy through regulation, and while it intervenes sporadically. - with hearings, budgetary decisions, minor statutory interventions and so on the bulk of decision-making is made by the executive. Truman desegregated the military with an executive order; Reagan used one to reorganize the federal bureaucracy. ― security, protection from Why has this happened? Citizens demand all kinds of goods from the government - financial crises, pollution control. Congress is disabled by its open, decentralized structure from making decisions quickly. Only a specialized, hierarchically controlled institution led by a single electorally accountable figure is supple enough to give the people what they want. Since Congress cannot deliver on its own, it has handed over authority to the executive. Unilateral executive power raises three concerns. The first is that the president will use his powers to indulge his ideological fancies like the Sun King. But, in fact, the president cares more about national public opinion than Congress does. The president alone has a national constituency and controls the fortunes of his party. The second is that presidential fiat short-circuits democratic debate as illustrated by the secret determination of surveillance policy. But most of what the president does is routine stuff that does not require public debate, and nearly all of it is public, so where the public takes an interest, debate ensues. And where the government must act secretly, only the president can lead it. The third is that unilateral executive action inevitably leads to tyranny. This founding-era belief has entered American D.N.A. But the founders lived at a time when kings ruled most countries; their historical referents were Caesar and Cromwell. Centuries of democratic experience teach a contrary lesson. It turns out that in a kind of paradox the vast legal powers of the president engender distrust among the public, and so he must proceed cautiously in order to maintain public support. Source: Posner, E. (Jan. 2014). Executive authority is a powerful tool to use with caution [opinion piece]. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/01/29/presidential-power-vs-congressional-inertia/executive- authority-is-a-powerful-tool-to-use-with-caution Document B: Presidents Cannot Ignore Laws as Written Elizabeth Price Foley is a professor of constitutional law at Florida International University College of Law. She is the author of "The Tea Party: Three Principles." As every grade-schooler knows, Congress has sole authority to make laws. The president has a corresponding duty to "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." When one branch of government exceeds its authority, separation of powers is violated, and representative government breaks down. Presidents have power to fill gaps or ambiguities in laws passed by Congress. They do not, however, have power to ignore laws as written. For example, when President Obama unilaterally raised the minimum wage for federal contractors' employees, he directly contravened the Fair Labor Standards Act, which says that "every employer shall pay to each of his employees" a minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. Executive orders can erode the separation of powers, breed disrespect for the rule of law and increase political polarization. President Obama has shown a penchant for ignoring the plain language of our laws. He unilaterally rewrote the employer mandate and several other provisions of the Affordable Care Act, failing to faithfully execute a law which declares, unambiguously, that these provisions "shall" apply beginning Jan. 1, 2014. Similarly, in suspending deportation for a class of young people who entered this country illegally, the president defied the Immigration and Nationality Act, which states that any alien who is "inadmissible at the time of entry" into the country "shall" be removed. The only strength gained by unilateral presidential lawmaking is raw speed: policies can be implemented more swiftly by unilateral presidential action than by congressional deliberation and debate. But the dangers are many, and should counsel any American of whatever political persuasion - that such dispatch comes at a high constitutional cost. - - When the president fails to execute a law as written, he not only erodes the separation of powers, he breeds disrespect for the rule of law and increases political polarization. The president's own party for example, the current Democrat- controlled Senate will face intense pressure to elevate short-term, partisan victory over defending constitutional principles. If partisan preferences prevail, Congress will be unable, as an institution, to check presidential ambition and defend its lawmaking prerogative. Once such precedent is established, damage to the constitutional architecture is permanent. The next president of a different party will face similar pressures and undo all the previous actions. He will initiate a new round of unilateral lawmaking, satisfying his own political base. The law will fluctuate back and forth, and our legislature will become little more than a rubber stamp for a single elected individual, which is not how representative government is supposed to work. Source: Price Foley, E. (Jan. 2014) Presidents cannot ignore laws as written [opinion piece]. New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/01/29/presidential-power-vs-congressional-inertia/presidents-cannot- ignore-laws-as-written Document C: Obama's Executive Orders Will Annoy Friends and Foes Saikrishna Prakash is a professor of law at the University of Virginia School of Law. His scholarship focuses on the separation of powers, and presidential powers. When a president acts unilaterally in an almost indiscriminate way, it is a sign that his presidency is on its last legs. It's taken five years, but President Obama has finally discovered that we have a presidential (and not parliamentary) system. Now his allies are talking up “an executive style of governing," and the White House even boasts of a "pen and phone" approach, to bypass Congress. The friends of the president cheer the unilateralism. His opponents jeer. Both should take a deep breath and reassess. Obama's allies will wonder why he didn't act sooner. His opposition in Congress will regret giving him so much discretion. Opponents of the president's unilaterialism should realize that his office enjoys considerable constitutional and statutory authority. Not every unilateral action marks the president a dictator or, worse yet, King George III. When Congress delegates tremendous discretion, no one should be surprised that the president might wield it. Congress has passed many laws to signal that the federal government “is doing something” about various problems, which effectively allows the executive to decide which laws to enforce vigorously and which laxly. For instance, Congress has not supplied enough resources to deport all undocumented, and so the president may decide that deporting some undocumented immigrants is not a priority. If the presidency has become imperial as Senator Ted Cruz charges, Congress has helped crown it. Some of the president's unilateralism rests on dubious legal arguments. Even though the Constitution never grants the president the power to suspend the law, the president has waived several features of his signature health care law on the grounds that doing so provided “transition relief.” Transition relief, to the extent that a statute permits it, seems more appropriate when a recently enacted law takes immediate effect and catches people and administrators unawares. It is hard to see why transition relief is necessary in the case of the health care law. Congress passed the law in 2010, giving the administration three years to implement it. The sheer number of exceptions and waivers should give the president's supporters pause. A Republican president might be happy to suspend various laws, including a new tax increase or a new pollution control law, on the grounds that “transition relief" is in order. Source: Prakash, S. (Jan. 2014) Obama's executive orders will annoy friends and foes [opinion piece]. New York Times . https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2014/01/29/presidential-power-vs-congressional-inertia/obamas-executive- orders-will-annoy-friends-and-foes Document D: President Obama's Desire to Wield Executive Power Is Understandable Norman J. Ornstein is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. Well before his State of the Union message, President Obama signaled that he would be using his executive authority in areas from climate change to the minimum wage if Congress did not act. Not surprisingly, this pledge has invoked outrage from the right, threats of lawsuits, and suggestions from Republicans in Congress that there would be payback if the president ignored or attempts to bypass the legislative branch. Of course, there are limits on presidential authority, and the delegation of executive power in Article II is much less clear and specific than the legislative powers enumerated in Article I. But it is a reality that every president since George Washington (with the exception of poor William Henry Harrison, who served only 32 sickly days in the White House) has used executive orders, including an extraordinary number and scope by activists Teddy Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt (who issued an astounding 3,522 of them) not to mention non-activist Calvin Coolidge, responsible for a cool 1,203 executive orders. To this point, Barack Obama has issued fewer executive orders than did George W. Bush. So Obama is well situated in historical precedent to use his executive power which means not just executive orders, but regulations and less formal executive actions. His desire to do so is understandable; as Tom Mann and I show clearly in our book “It's Even Worse Than It Looks," Republicans in Congress, from Obama's first day in office, followed an explicit strategy to vote in unison against major and most minor initiatives of his, while Republicans in the Senate deliberately slow-walked, via filibusters and holds, even legislation that ultimately passed unanimously or nearly so, just to gum up the works. Despite the spending deal and the new farm bill, there are few signs that we or he have entered a broader era of compromise and achievement. If we have, Obama will be happier, and better served, to go the legislative route. Executive action is cleaner, to be sure, and better than nothing. But it is very limited in its scope and duration. The one executive action announced by Obama Tuesday night, raising the minimum wage for employees of contractors with the government, will affect only a tiny slice of those who have jobs at or near the minimum wage. Executive action, even if it can bring about some policy change, is no substitute for a comprehensive immigration bill, or a broad action to limit carbon emissions. At the same time, executive actions can be significant — and it will be especially interesting to see not just how far Obama is willing to push the envelope, but what court challenges emerge, and how conservative judges, previously champions of executive power, will react when the executive using the power is Barack Obama. The Supreme Court, for example, gave the Environmental Protection Agency the authority to regulate carbon emissions. If somehow this Supreme Court got a case challenging that authority, and took it way, it would show the kind of situational constitutionalism that characterized Bush v. Gore. And show that dysfunction remains the coin of the realm in contemporary American politics.