Trump touts orders he once lambasted
FREQUENT USE OF EXECUTIVE ORDERS SHOWS STRUGGLES IN GETTING LEGISLATION THROUGH CONGRESS CONTROLLED BY OWN PARTY
President Donald Trump will mark the end of his first 100 days in office with a flurry of executive orders, looking to fulfil campaign promises and rack up victories ahead of that milestone by turning to a presidential tool he once derided.
But Trump’s frequent use of the executive order points to his struggles getting legislation though a Congress controlled by his own party and few of the orders themselves appear to deliver the sweeping changes the president has promised.
White House aides said that Trump will have signed 32 executive orders by Friday, the most of any president in their first 100 days since the Second World War.
Far cry from campaign
That’s a far cry from Trump’s heated campaign rhetoric, in which he railed against his predecessor’s use of executive action late in his tenure as President Barack Obama sought to manoeuvre around a Republican Congress. Trump argued that he, the consummate deal maker, wouldn’t need to rely on the tool.
“The country wasn’t based on executive orders,” said Trump at a town hall in South Carolina in February 2016.
“Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.”
But after taking office, Trump has learnt to love the executive order. This week, he will sign one on rural issues, another on veterans and several on energy.
The White House has defended the use of executive orders as necessary to accomplish the speedy solutions it says the American people elected Trump to enact. At first, the president’s West Wing advisers fashioned an onslaught of executive action to set the tone for this term, with the centrepiece of that first-week blitz being Trump’s travel ban.
But that hastily drawn ban was rejected by the courts. A second replacement order also remains in judicial limbo.
Presidents frequently turn to executive orders when they struggle to advance their agendas through Congresses controlled by the opposition party. In Trump’s case, he’s struggled even though both houses of Congress are in the hands of Republicans. His health care bill never even came for a vote in the House of Representatives after it drew sharp criticism from moderate and conservative Republicans alike.
And in the Senate, Republicans need to win over some Democratic lawmakers to get the 60 votes needed for passage of a contested bill.
But the Senate is generally more inclined to cut bipartisan deals than the House because senators have statewide constituencies.
Obama-era safeguards
“This president has found that legislating is hard work,” said Mark Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government.
“Executive orders are the easiest, simplest way to showcase action by the president to begin to fulfil some of the pledges made in the campaign. Executive orders show action. But oftentimes they are often symbolic and only have a marginal impact on policy.”
A review of Trump’s executive orders reveals that a number of them represent necessary first steps at unravelling Obama-era environmental safeguards and financial service regulations.
In some cases, there is no other way around those administrative hoops and some of the orders have brought about major changes.
Among them: his late March order that directed federal agencies to rescind any existing regulations that “unduly burden the development of domestic energy resources,” a move that rolls back environmental protections that was denounced by Democrats and environmentalists and cheered by Republicans who advocate energy independence.
But many of Trump’s executive orders signed with great fanfare have had little immediate impact.
While Trump has pledged to overhaul the nation’s tax code, the order he signed on Friday simply commissions a review of the nation’s tax regulations.
Yesterday, Trump was expected to sign an order that will create an inter-agency task force that will be charged with identifying measures to spur American agricultural growth.