By Jonah Goldberg
Wednesday, February 19, 2014
Of all the time-honored failings for which we criticize
sitting presidents -- by "we" I mean pundits, academics and other
members of the chattering phylum -- two charges stand out: imperialism and
shrinkage. Usually it's one or the other.
When the president is unpopular or when he's lost control
of his agenda or when he just seems inadequate to the demands of the job, the
headline "The Incredible Shrinking Presidency" proliferates like
kudzu. When the Republicans lost control of Congress in 2006, the Economist
proclaimed "The Incredible Shrinking Presidency" of George W. Bush on
its cover. Barack Obama has been diagnosed with presidential shrinkage many
times, including in Politico, the New York Times and my own National Review.
The flip side of the shrinking presidency is the imperial
presidency, something we've been fretting by name since at least Franklin
Roosevelt and in principle since the founding.
Politically, what is remarkable is that Obama seems to be
doing both at the same time. His "Year of Action" -- intended to
dispel that lame-duck scent -- is simultaneously Caesar-like and pathetic.
(Maybe the presidential seal should depict that dude from the Little Caesars
pizza commercials?) Last week, he announced that he would unilaterally raise
the minimum wage for federal contractors seeking new work. Only 1 percent of
the workforce makes the minimum wage, according to the Bureau of Labor
Statistics, and vanishingly few of them work for the federal government. This
probably explains why the White House wouldn't give an actual number when asked
how many people his bold action would benefit.
Yet, at the Democratic retreat last week, Obama threw
cold water on the idea that he could do much more on immigration from the Oval
Office, saying there are "outer limits to what we can do by executive
action."
Some of his unilateral actions are a bigger deal, of
course. The Environmental Protection Agency's decision to treat carbon dioxide
as a "pollutant" is an outrageous expansion of executive power. But
Obama doesn't tout that as a bullet point; he let the EPA take the political
heat for that decision a while ago. His multiple unilateral revisions to
Obamacare run the gamut from desperate tinkering to outright lawlessness. But
flop-sweat panic to compensate for executive incompetence and to fend off a
rout in the midterms doesn't exactly project presidential boldness either.
The "Year of Action" should actually be seen as
a replay of President Clinton's small-ball comeback after the 1994 midterms.
Clinton picked micro-initiatives -- school uniforms, the V-chip, etc. -- that
poll-tested well but amounted to very little in terms of policy. The clever
twist Obama is putting on his micro-agenda is doing it in a way that
successfully baits opponents into making the case that he's more powerful and
relevant than he really is.
Substantively, however, the imperial presidency continues
to metastasize. "The presidency," the Cato Institute's Gene Healy has
written, "keeps shrinking, but -- with an executive branch of some 2.1
million civilian employees and counting -- it never gets any smaller." As
a branch of government, it has grown under Republicans and Democrats alike. Some
curbs were put on the office under Richard Nixon because of Watergate, and
because Democrats don't like it when Republican presidents behave like
Democratic ones.
"Those who tried to warn us back at the beginning of
the New Deal of the dangers of one-man rule that lay ahead on the path we were
taking toward strong, centralized government may not have been so wrong,"
Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston of California remarked in 1973 during Watergate.
That's a lesson Democrats would do well to ponder,
because they are rhetorically giving Obama license to do whatever he likes.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) recently declared that the priority for her
and her comrades should be to draft executive orders -- not laws -- for Obama
to sign. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) suggested on "Fox News
Sunday" that the president could rewrite Obamacare at whim because the
Constitution gives him the power to act during a national security threat. And
of course, Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) blew up the filibuster rules for appointees.
They shouldn't be surprised if the next Republican
president takes advantage of that license.
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