In digesting so much of the election post-mortem this past week, I’m reminded of a couple classic phrases: “The pen is mightier than the sword” and “he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.”
What we’re going to see on President Obama’s legacy is “he who lives by the pen, dies by the pen.”
Obama has enjoyed flexing the power of the presidential pen, issuing a record number of executive orders, rules, regulations and agency directives that circumvented that whole pesky democracy and compromise stuff. Now it’s likely that many of Obama’s cherished accomplishments will disappear in a matter of minutes when he gives up his pen for the $200,000-per-speech speaker circuit.
If Hillary Clinton fulfilled the destiny that the Left had predicted, Obama’s overuse of the executive pen for the last several years wouldn’t be such a big deal. It now, however, puts almost his entire legislative legacy at risk.
He didn’t hide it either. After failing to lead and refusing to persuade Congress on policy debate after policy debate Obama threw up his hands in 2014 and said, “I’ve got a pen and a phone.” That would become Obama’s favorite leadership method: Not leading at all.
Obama’s frustration with Congress was evident during his whole presidency, a challenge most presidents deal with by learning to work with Congress. Obama never bothered with it. How can you expect someone to negotiate and compromise when he’s got guest appearances on “The View” and “Ellen”?
Unfortunately for the Left, the frustration won’t just stop at unravelling Obama’s policy legacy, but, with the imperial precedent Obama set, also the freedom that a President Trump is going to feel when he gets the same pen.
The almost ironic part about being president is that you hold the most powerful job in the world, but you still only occupy one branch of government. The checks and balances of the judicial and legislative branches are there to make sure you don’t go too crazy. But, you’re just there by yourself. The other branches have colleagues to fight against, rules to follow and a lot less security to deal with. Therefore, it’s even more frustrating when you realize that even with all that power, it might be necessary to negotiate with some members of Congress.
All presidents understand that working with Congress is a necessary evil to accomplish their agenda — or 43 presidents did, at least. When President Reagan passed tax reform in the 1980s, he worked with the Left. President Clinton frequently had conversations with the Right. When President George W. Bush passed No Child Left Behind, he worked closely with Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. While not every conversation worked out every time – Clinton vetoed welfare reform several times before relenting – they kept working with Congress.
Alternatively, Obama pushed his signature healthcare reform bill through without Republican support. Then he bolstered it by picking up the phone and having it implemented to his standards instead of the way that the bill stated it should be implemented. (And he keeps changing it without asking anyone, too.)
This isn’t just Obama’s fault. Presidents from both parties have used their pens. In fact, some have used their pen even more than Obama has. For instance, President Franklin Roosevelt put out more than 3,000 executive orders. However, that doesn’t make any presidential use of executive orders, signing statements or executive overreach good.
The hard part for the Left, when they start attacking Trump for his inevitable use of executive orders, will be the hypocrisy in light of their silence, and even defense, of Obama’s liberal use of his pen instead of taking the time to work through issues with Congress.
We don’t know what type of president Trump will be. Maybe, just like we had to pass Obamacare to learn what was in it, we had to elect Trump to see what kind of president he’ll be? But we do know that as soon as he figures out how to take the lid off of his presidential pen, he will wipe out policies from health care to funding that were championed by the Left as presidential accomplishments. As he starts to unravel some of the regulatory mess that was created in almost the same way, the Trump administration will quickly become a darling of the right. They have Obama to thank for that, but that also means that if the Trump administration loses that support they will only have themselves to blame.
There are supposed to be checks, balances and compromise. Those are all important policies and roles to assert when your party is in power, because it is likely that you won’t always be in power. We should all push back against executive overreach.
Charles Sauer is a contributer to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is president of the Market Institute and previously worked on Capitol Hill, for a governor and for an academic think tank. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
