President Obama’s legacy is entirely dependent on the idea that a Republican commander in chief would not dare to roll back a series of executive moves meant to cement his place in the history books.
It’s an uncomfortable reality for a president who views unilateral action as the best way to deliver on campaign pledges that lack legislative support and fulfill his own lofty prognostications of what a progressive government could accomplish.
Even if a series of administrative measures — including the deferral of deportations for millions of illegal immigrants, unprecedented regulations to limit carbon emissions and new rules for oversight of the Internet — can withstand court challenges, they could all be quickly undone if a Republican wins control of the White House.
Republicans this week have repeatedly alluded to such a development as Obama pursues a nuclear deal with Iran and moves forward on a wide-ranging climate pact with China.
That’s why much of Obama’s final time in office will be spent normalizing actions that have yet to command overwhelming support, trying to make his policies so embedded in the political culture that it would appear extreme to strike them down, Democrats said.
“What the president did is rooted in the belief that his vision will win out, that voters would punish anybody for trying to scrap [his policies],” a former Obama senior administration official told the Washington Examiner.
“And I think the longer these programs are in effect, the more natural they will seem. If you’re a Republican, it’s one thing to actually say you’re going to burn everything down and another to actually do so when you’re sitting behind that desk [in the White House].”
Even Republicans would concede they are up against a large amount of existence bias, one that would become more pronounced if Democrats retain control of the White House in 2016.
The Iran and climate deals, for example, would have the imprimatur of the United Nations. And on immigration, a GOP president would effectively be taking away benefits already given to millions of illegal immigrants.
The president has framed such a challenge as unfair to those on the receiving end of new protections.
“It’s true that a future administration might try to reverse some of our policies,” Obama recently told immigration advocates concerned that his executive action would not continue under a GOP president. “It’s not likely, politically, that they’d reverse everything that we’ve done, but it could be that some people then end up being in a disadvantageous position. And nobody is going to have a path to actual citizenship until we get a law passed. ”
Therein lies the risk of the Obama approach. The president insists that he was forced to take unilateral action in the absence of legislative willpower — but by doing so, he essentially scuttled any hope for a new law and the permanence that comes with it.
Obama has learned how difficult it can be to undo the actions of a White House predecessor, having failed to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for example, despite pledging to do so right after entering the Oval Office.
However, if Republicans simply undo Obama’s unilateral actions, they will face mounting pressure to offer up specific alternatives of their own.
Nowhere is this challenge more apparent than the looming Supreme Court ruling on the legality of the payment of Obamacare subsidies through federal exchanges. Conservatives have yet to identify a backup plan for how millions of people obtain healthcare coverage if the high court punctures the president’s signature domestic initiative.
Obama is banking that the practical challenge of wiping clean his various blueprints is too great for a Republican president to follow through on pledges to start anew.
Some political observers say Obama’s efforts are intended to establish precedent, continuing the expansion of executive power that has become a staple of each new administration.
Critics insist the president is clearly overplaying his hand.
“It’s not that it’s popular or unpopular,” Republican pollster David Winston told the Examiner. “It’s the sense that if Obama’s viewpoint doesn’t represent a majority coalition, and if the next president does, they’ll go with the position representative of that.”
