Written in sand
Trump is washing away Obama’s legacy
President Donald Trump’s decision to pull out of the Iran nuclear deal made quite a stir last week, as people on both sides hotly debated the merits of the action.
One thing that cannot be debated, however, is the vast extent to which the Trump administration has dismantled the policies of his predecessor, President Barack Obama.
The list is long. In addition to the Iran deal, Mr. Trump has pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accords. He has ended the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — otherwise known as the “Dreamers” program that gives amnesty to illegal immigrants brought here when they were minors — although this move is still under review in the federal court system.
And, while the Republican majority in Congress could not repeal Obamacare outright, they did do away with the individual mandate that requires people to buy insurance, and the Trump administration has used its regulatory discretion to substantially alter Obamacare in the states. It has also taken a sledgehammer to Obama-era regulations, especially regarding the environment and communications.
Where you stand on this depends almost entirely where you have been sitting. If you dislike Mr. Obama, you probably have been cheering. If you love Mr. Obama, you have probably been gnashing your teeth.
Either way, the seeming ease with which Mr. Trump has undone Mr. Obama’s policies is an illustration of the limits of presidential governance.
As president, Mr. Obama was a big believer in executive authority. Granted, all presidents in the modern age have looked expansively on their own powers, but Mr. Obama was unique in the extent to which he sought to use the executive branch to effectively write the law. In so doing, he often pushed the boundary of what was considered constitutional and had his initiatives struck down several times by the courts.
Mr. Obama’s rationale was that congressional Republicans always refused to make a deal, so he had to do things himself. “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he told his Cabinet in early 2014, and he was going to use them to act. As a constitutionalist, I strongly disagreed. There is no “Congress Refuses To Act” clause in the Constitution. If your political opponents will not go along with you, tough. The president is tasked with enforcing the law, not writing it.
And now we see the real problem with Mr. Obama’s “pen and phone”: The next president has them, too!
What Mr. Obama built through presidential discretion, Mr. Trump can just as easily tear down. On Iran, climate change, regulations, immigration — Mr. Obama decided to circumvent Congress and effectively write the law himself. It was great for liberals at the time, but the legacy of a president who works independent of Congress depends entirely on the disposition of his successors.
I think the Obama White House was utterly convinced that a Democrat would win the presidential election in 2016. The president and his staff believed that his victories in 2008 and 2012 had fundamentally changed the political landscape. Hillary Clinton could ride his coattails into the Oval Office, where she could cement his legacy. Oops!
The truth is that Mr. Obama and his team overlooked more than 60 years of electoral history, which suggests the country likes to put someone of a different party in the Oval Office after a president has served two terms. In fact, the only time since Dwight Eisenhower that a party has won a third consecutive term was in 1988 when George H.W. Bush succeeded Ronald Reagan.
Mr. Obama also seriously underestimated the opposition to him, which had been brewing since 2010. Mr. Trump’s near sweep of the industrial Midwest did not come from nowhere. Going into the 2012 election, Republicans had total control of state governments in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — all of which Mr. Trump won.
Ultimately, the Obama legacy is falling apart because it was built on sand. Acting independent of Congress works in the long term only if you are succeeded by an ally, and Mr. Obama ignored the many good reasons to doubt that would be the case.