...
On June 15, 2012, the president strode into the Rose Garden to make an announcement. For the last five years, congressional Republicans had been blocking the DREAM Act: a bill designed to provide a conditional pathway to citizenship for immigrants who were brought to America illegally as children. Pressed by Latino advocates to take action, Obama had spent 2011 repeating that “we are doing everything we can administratively” because “this notion that somehow I can just change the laws unilaterally is not true.”
But now the president was doing something that he’d previously deemed impossible, and that Congress had repeatedly forbidden: singlehandedly granting relief to an entire category of young immigrants, as many as 1.7 million people, who’d otherwise be subject to deportation.
The reaction from Republicans was swift and severe. “The president’s directive is an affront to our system of representative government and the legislative process, and it’s an inappropriate use of executive power,” thundered Sen. Chuck Grassley. “We should all be appalled at how this plan has been carried out.”
...
Barack Obama’s decision to reverse himself on the DREAM Act was not an isolated incident. Instead, it was the culmination of a dramatic and very deliberate makeover that was set in motion that night with Boehner; that continues to this day; and that is poised to play a significant part in a potential second term, according to his advisers.
“The president’s hope is that he and Congress get another opportunity to work together, and they see the folly in their efforts to date,” says Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “But what he’s not going to do, if Congress refuses to act, is sit on the sidelines and do nothing. That’s the path he’s taken.”
It is a transformation that could forever alter the way Washington works.
Since the summer of 2011, Obama’s relationship with Congress, and with his own power, has undergone a fundamental shift. As a candidate, Obama decried George W. Bush’s “my way or the highway” approach to governing. But while Obama has dialed back many of Bush’s overseas excesses, the record level of congressional obstruction at home has compelled the president to expand his domestic authority in ways that his predecessor never did.
In February 2011, Obama announced that his administration would stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act in court, sparking controversy about whether he was shirking his duty to faithfully execute the laws passed by Congress. The following spring, the president effectively implemented greenhouse-gas regulations stalled in the Senate by allowing the EPA to interpret existing law more broadly. In September, Obama issued waivers that released states from the onerous requirements of No Child Left Behind but bound them to the administration’s own education policies, which Congress had not passed.
A similar set of welfare waivers soon followed. And in early 2012 the president bypassed the usual confirmation process to make four recess appointments even though the Senate had been holding pro forma sessions to block them. “This isn’t just pushing the envelope,” says Charles Tiefer, a former lawyer for the House of Representatives who now teaches constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, “but in effect breaking out of the envelope.”
Like everything else in Washington, D.C., Obama’s power play is a polarizing topic. Conservatives have charged the president with “reject[ing] the patience of politics required by the Constitution he has sworn to uphold” (George Will) and succumbing to the sort “naked lawlessness” that is the “very definition of executive overreach” (Charles Krauthammer). Liberals, meanwhile, have cheered Obama on. “President Obama devoted a great deal of effort to finding compromises with Congressional Republicans. That was futile,” wrote Andrew Rosenthal of The New York Times. “Government by executive order is not sustainable ... But in this particular case, there may be no alternative.”
Barack Obama’s decision to reverse himself on the DREAM Act was not an isolated incident. Instead, it was the culmination of a dramatic and very deliberate makeover that was set in motion that night with Boehner; that continues to this day; and that is poised to play a significant part in a potential second term, according to his advisers. “The president’s hope is that he and Congress get another opportunity to work together, and they see the folly in their efforts to date,” says Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “But what he’s not going to do, if Congress refuses to act, is sit on the sidelines and do nothing. That’s the path he’s taken.”
It is a transformation that could forever alter the way Washington works.
...
Conservatives like to argue that there’s nothing unique about the GOP’s current tactics. “This idea of unprecedented obstructionism is entirely ahistorical,” says a staffer for Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. “This is part of what the system does.”
But the statistics tell a different story. Under Carter, Reagan, Bush 41, Clinton, and Bush 43, the Senate confirmed between 79 and 93 percent of the judicial nominees put forward during each administration’s first 18 months. The confirmation rate under Obama? Forty-three percent, or roughly half the historical norm. In 1981, 37 Senate Democrats voted for Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts; 20 years later, 12 Senate Democrats voted for George W. Bush’s. In contrast, Obama pushed seven major bills before Republicans took control of the House in 2011. They received only 15 Republican votes—total.
Since then, very few challenging pieces of legislation have even reached the floor of the Senate, thanks to the GOP’s record-shattering reliance on the filibuster. In the last three sessions of Congress, Republicans have threatened to filibuster on 385 separate occasions—equaling, in five short years, the total number of filibuster threats to seize the Senate during the seven decades from the start of World War I until the end of Reagan administration. A recent study showed that post-2007, with Republicans in the minority, threatened or actual filibusters have affected 70 percent of major legislation. In the 1980s, that number was 27 percent. In the 1960s, it was 8 percent. “This level of obstruction is extremely unusual,” says Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. “And the core of the problem is the GOP.”
...
But what if the problem with Obama’s “We Can’t Wait” doctrine is more functionalist than formalist? In other words, what if it’s not the law that’s being broken here?
What if it’s Washington itself?
...
(a thing conservatives actually believe).
Facebook
Twitter