In the 2014 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama declared, “wherever and whenever I can take steps without legislation to expand opportunity for more American families, that’s what I’m going to do.”
While Obama is motivated by a noble sentiment, to improve the lives of millions of American families still suffering the economic aftershocks of the recent recession, the means by which he seeks to instigate this improvement, by non-legislative measures, is severely misguided.
Because of congressional gridlock, the Obama administration has been and continues to circumvent the congressional legislative process through executive action. The administration is overreaching its constitutional authority, undermining the rule of law and establishing dangerous precedents, despite its noble intents. Obama should cease these actions.
The Obama administration has been mired by a polarized and gridlocked Congress. Since Obama took office in 2008, Congress has consistently resorted to obstinate partisan squabbling instead of legislating. The shutdown of the federal government this past October serves as the most recent example of this governmental dysfunction, during which 800,000 federal government employees were furloughed and the American economy lost $24 billion.
While it is certainly fair that the Obama administration grows tired of this gridlock, Obama is attempting to remedy it by incorrect means. In recent executive actions, Obama has made executive decisions that have been reserved by the Constitution and judicial precedent for Congress.
For example, following the State of the Union address, Obama has announced a series of executive actions to address climate change, including financing solar farms in the Mojave Desert and mandating the State Department to stop funding coal-powered projects overseas. Republican lawmakers have taken the Obama administration to federal court on the matter, with the case heard on Monday, Feb. 22, over the president’s misuse of executive authority.
Consider the boggled rollout of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) last fall. Despite administration assurances that such an event would not happen, 6.2 million Americans were poised to lose their health insurance. To stay true to this promise to the American public, the Obama administration moved the onset date of the ACA from Jan. 1, 2014, to Jan. 1, 2015. This move by the administration is unlawful because only Congress can change the effective date of a law’s institution.
Moreover, the Obama administration is undermining the rule of law by changing the law in such a manner. When Obama signed the ACA into law in 2010, healthcare companies were told that the new policies would begin on New Year’s Day of 2014. By arbitrarily changing the implementation date by executive mandate, the administration is demonstrating a disregard for the healthcare industry, a massive sector of our economy, spending on which constituted 18 percent of GDP in 2010.
This capricious change in policy by the administration sends bad signals to the healthcare industry, which is poised to grow dramatically in coming decades, and American enterprise as whole. Law needs to be consistently executed in accord with the legislative decision in order to facilitate a well-functioning business environment. By so suddenly changing the policy in a manner inconsistent with constitutional precedent, the Obama administration is undermining a sacrosanct value of our liberal, capitalist system – rule of law.
The Obama administration is setting a dangerous precedent for executive action, not only in business matters, but also for the entire nature of our governmental structure. While today the Obama administration abuses its executive power for the benevolent purposes of environmental protection and universal affordable health care, decades onward we cannot be so certain that a future administration will have the same benign intents.
What today is executive overreach for the expansion of the right to affordable healthcare could tomorrow be the abridgment of freedom of speech. Obama must cease this misalignment of the separation of powers and stick to the powers reserved to the executive branch, the execution of the law, not the legislation of new policy. The power of legislation belongs to Congress, as mandated in Article I of the Constitution.
While the Obama administration has abused its power, Congress is equally guilty of its own misconduct: the failure to responsibly legislate. Congress has repeatedly been unsuccessful in making decisions that are vital to the integrity and prosperity of the United States, as evident during the debt-ceiling crises of 2011 and federal shutdown of 2013. This is largely the result of an increasing partisan polarization in Congress, where currently the most “liberal” Republican is more conservative than the most “conservative” Democrat.
In Obama’s honorable desire to accomplish the “change” that he promised while campaigning for presidential seat in 2008 in spite of the Congressional gridlock, he has had to resort to executive overreach because of Congressional inaction.
Such overreaching policies are not the answer though, as they risk the competitiveness of the United States as a business environment and establish a dangerous precedent.
While we should sympathize with Obama for the sclerotic Congress that he must attempt to work with, we should not endorse his attempts to remedy the situation with executive overreach.
Instead, Obama should cease his policy of executive overreach, and Congress should attempt to once again become an effective legislature.
Hopefully the public will acknowledge the paralysis that afflicts the American legislative branch and use the power of the ballot in upcoming congressional elections to help begin the remedy of this federal plight.
Ben Perlmutter is a College sophomore from Chappaqua, N.Y.
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