Former senator Phil Gramm and Michael Solon, who used to be Senator Mitch McConnell's budget adviser, put something nice in our Christmas stockings this morning. Writing in today's Wall Street Journal, they show how a Republican president could make fast work of President Obama's legacy:
President Obama seems to aspire to join Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan as one of the three most transformative presidents of the past hundred years, and by all outward signs he has achieved that goal. But while Roosevelt and Reagan sold their programs to the American people and enacted them with bipartisan support, Mr. Obama jammed his partisan agenda down the public’s throat. The Obama legacy is built on executive orders, regulations and agency actions that can be overturned using the same authority Mr. Obama employed to put them in place.
Many of President Obama's policies did not go through Congress–which he doesn't much seem to like–but were the result of executive actions. Among these unilateral actions: changes in immigration policies, blocking of the Keystone XL pipeline, the potentially disastrous nuclear agreement with Iran, and normalization of our relations with Cuba. Everyone of these could be overturned by executive action of the next president.
Gramm and Solon suggest that a new president could use an inaugural address to rescind all the Obama regulations that have hampered our economic growth, which are built on executive branch regulations and not on congressional action:
If the new president proves as committed to overturning these regulations as Mr. Obama was to implementing them, these rules could be amended or overturned. And because Senate Democrats “nuked” the right of the minority to filibuster administration nominees, the new president’s appointees could not be blocked by Democrats if Republicans retain control of the Senate.
To accelerate this process, the new president should name cabinet and agency appointees before the 115th Congress begins. He could declare an economic emergency and ask the agencies to initiate the rule-making process promptly. On the first day in the Oval Office the president could order federal agencies to halt consideration of all pending regulations—precisely as President Obama did.
Some of the Obama transformation is rooted in law, but even here there was a trick that renders it vulnerable: sometimes, as in the case of Dodd-Frank, the details of the law were not spelled out, and, indeed probably could not have passed even the liberal Congress with which the Obama years began. Instead enormous power was given to bureaucrats to interpret the law. Thus, many of Dodd-Frank's most pernicious features liely could be erased without legislative action.
The Affordable Care Act also granted vast flexibility, and a new president could use thisvery same flexibility to dismantle large parts of the law to prevent it from becoming more embedded in our system, as Congress debates repeal and replacement.
Because of the way President Obama went about his transformation, it is vulnerable to a Republican president:
By relentlessly pursuing an agenda that was outside the political mainstream, Mr. Obama became the most polarizing president of the past century. Had he compromised with his own party and a handful of Republicans, much of his vision might have been firmly cemented into law on a bipartisan basis. But by doing it his way, Mr. Obama built an imposing sand castle that is now imperiled by the changing tides of voter sentiment. All the American electorate must do now is choose a president totally committed to overturning the Obama program—and Obama’s sand castle will be washed away.
Caveat: A President Hillary Clinton would solidify and make permanent the Obama transformations. She has already said that she is willing to overreach on immigration and gun control.