During a Monday interview with NPR, President Obama urged his successor to avoid relying on executive action. The next day, he did the opposite, unilaterally closing millions of acres of the Atlantic and Arctic oceans to oil exploration. The episode offers a primer on the Left’s double standard on presidential power.
While Obama urges President-elect Trump to work with Congress, he’s acknowledged another set of rules for his own actions. Whatever is not expressly forbidden — and more importantly whatever a Democrat president can get away with — is permissible.
The drilling ban at once solidifies Obama’s legacy as an environmentalist as well as an imaginative and overreaching executive. To establish the ban, the White House dusted off an obscure section of the Outer Continental Shelfs Act, legislation signed by President Dwight Eisenhower back in 1953. And now, according to the administration, most U.S. Artic waters are off limits “indefinitely.”
The Obama administration insists that, unlike an executive order, this ban can’t be immediately reversed. “There is no authority for subsequent presidents to un-withdraw,” a White House aide told The Washington Post. Though oil companies insist the move can be reversed, it’s likely to tie Trump in knots and lead to a legal challenge.
The feat was achieved by dramatically reimagining the 1950’s era legislation. When President Truman issued the original executive order (which Congress later codified and Eisenhower signed” it was designed as solution to the “long ranging world-wide need for new sources of petroleum.” What was meant to facilitate exploration, the Obama administration has repurposed to curb exploration.
More than hypocritical, it’s dangerous. The move furthers Obama’s dangerous precedent of legal deconstructionism. This isn’t the first time Obama has reoriented existing law toward new initiatives. He cannibalized an obscure provision in the 1970 Clean Air Act to force new regulation on the states. The meaning of a law doesn’t matter, when it can simply be reimagined.
While that was advantageous for Obama while he was in office, now it’s a liability. If he wants Trump to show restraint and rely on Congress, perhaps the outgoing executive should try following his own advice for the next month.
Philip Wegmann is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.
