As current polls and election exit polls showed, President Obama is almost as popular now as he has been in seven years. Even so, the election results, both for president and for Congress, showed that voters don’t want his policies anymore. Obama certainly has no mandate to make any major changes on his way out the door.
House Republicans were therefore right this month to pass the Midnight Rule Relief Act, which will allow Congress to overturn such regulations en masse.
We are also especially disappointed by Democrats’ short-sightedness in opposing the measure along party lines. Because this is not just about Obama, it is also about his successor and every president who follows. Democrats’ excuses for opposing the bill were wholly disingenuous. They argued, for example, that this would allow Congress to block an executive action necessary for national security. But if Congress believes a last-minute executive action is truly necessary for national security, then presumably it will not repeal it.
This is really about the ability of one president to cause headaches for the next. The EPA is rushing to put new oil, gas and ethanol regulations into effect that will harm the economy. It is also rushing to implement the Clean Power Plan before Trump’s appointees take over.
No eight-year presidency should end with a flurry of 11th-hour executive agency rules and regulations, especially after voters have pronounced judgment and chosen to take the country in a new direction.
Such regulatory abuses are the logical outcome of the inordinate importance placed these days on the temporary occupant of the Oval Office. Long-term solutions are needed that look beyond Obama and beyond even his successor to restore congressional authority and clip the wings of the imperial presidency.
Not only do we hope the Senate follows suit by passing the Midnight Rule Relief Act, but we also hope the next Congress will serve the public further by setting aside partisanship and reclaiming more of its authority from a president of the same party.
They can start by passing the REINS Act, which would require congressional approval for the most costly regulations proposed by executive agencies. The regulatory process is supposed to be the handmaiden of the law, not a process by which unelected bureaucrats create law or find new and creative interpretations that give them more power.
What’s more, Congress needs to learn from other distortions that Obama introduced into the executive-legislative relationship, because Trump and future presidents are likely to repeat them. For example, Congress gave the president too much flexibility in their laws requiring sanctions against Iran. As a result, Obama was able to push through his Iran nuclear deal despite 55 out of 100 senators voting against it.
House Speaker Paul Ryan recently noted, “We’ve seen violence done to the separation of powers.” He is right. We hope he has bigger things in mind than the restoration of the earmarking process, the subject he was addressing when he said this. If he does, the coming Trump presidency will be an excellent opportunity to restore constitutional limits on an office that has gotten out of hand under one president after another.
