During the debate in Las Vegas, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked Jim Webb how, if were he elected, “he would not be a third term for Obama.” Webb said that “there would be a major difference between my administration and the Obama administration,” and it would concern “the use of executive authority.”
Here Webb was raising President Obama’s pronounced tendency to make law by means of executive action, the instruments of which include executive orders, presidential memorandums, agency directives and guidance. Obama contends that there has been sufficient legal authority for his unilateral governance, and that he has resorted to it only because Congress has failed to act. Obama’s most contested executive actions have been taken in the areas of immigration and health care.
The president’s unilateralism is among the major issues for Republican presidential candidates, with some (Cruz, Fiorina, Santorum) promising to “rescind” or “undo” all or at least many of Obama’s executive actions. Webb didn’t make such a promise—he is a Democrat, after all—but his lack of enthusiasm for unilateral executive action and its employment by Obama was evident in the rest of his answer to Cooper’s question:
“I came up as a committee counsel in the Congress, used to put dozens of bills through the House floor every year as a committee counsel on the Veterans Committee. I have a very strong feeling about how our federal system works and how we need to lead and energize the congressional process instead of allowing these divisions to continue to paralyze what we’re doing. So I would lead — working with both parties in the Congress and working through them in the traditional way that our Constitution set.”
Webb’s evident repudiation of lawmaking by unilateral, Congress-circumventing actions and his embrace of “the traditional way” would be big news if the former senator were a leading candidate.
Of the other four candidates at the debate, Hillary Clinton, who is the leading candidate, had occasion to refer to Obama’s executive-action presidency. Noting the president’s executive action on immigration, under which as many as five million unauthorized immigrants are being spared deportation, Clinton said that as president she “would go further,” implying that she would like to see that number increased.
The follow-up question that was not asked Clinton was whether she would go further by asking Congress to legislate or by making law the Obama way–by herself.
