by Steven Law After the 2010 congressional elections, which President Obama admitted were a “shellacking” of his party at the hands of irate independent voters, the President and his administration shifted gears.
When Democrats ran all of Congress, the Administration was curiously passive, leaving the details and even major decisions of legislation to committee chairs and floor leaders. But with Republicans empowered to put a brake on Obama’s policies, his Administration has adopted a full-throttle, two-pronged strategy: attack Congress indiscriminately (even if Democrats are collateral damage) and push past the constitutional boundaries on executive authority to keep pushing the President’s agenda.
But to fully grasp where we are now – and why it matters – it’s important to look back at how we got here.
Once upon a time, a Democrat president was elected with muscular majorities in Congress that would give him whatever his heart desired. The only limit on their appetites and ambitions was what they could agree upon themselves.
And they agreed upon a lot.
Together, they charged trillions to the nation’s credit card, for stimulus, bailouts, cash for clunkers, and “green energy” giveaways. They passed a sweeping reordering of the realm’s financial system. And their crown jewel was a government takeover of the land’s health care. We continue to discover out what was in that bill – as Nancy Pelosi promised we would – and it doesn’t have a happy ending.
At some point, the citizens of this realm became alarmed, and dispatched new representatives to Congress two years ago to restrain this President’s extravagant spending habits and his reckless expansion of federal power over people’s lives. And that is what these representatives have sought to do.
However, the president was not amused. He bristled at these parvenus who had come to Washington to check his ambitious agenda. He ordered them to “pass this bill,” and then attacked their patriotism when they refused to submit to his great authority.
This, of course, is not a fairy tale. It’s what’s happening right now in President Obama’s Washington.
What we see increasingly is a president who seems to chafe at the inefficiencies of democracy. A president who regularly and openly expresses contempt for the coequal branches of government set forth by the Framers. We see a president using executive power not only in contravention of established constitutional limitations, but to get around the express will of the people as articulated at the ballot box and through their elected representatives. Instead of “We the People” being the guiding ethic of our nation’s governance, this president has substituted the Orwellian political slogan, “We can’t wait.”
President Obama frequently likes to portray himself as a victim of congressional intransigence, a great leader who could accomplish so much more if he were free from the obstinacy of little men. He says often, in various ways, that the limits placed on him by Congress leave him no choice other than unilateral executive action. In other moments, President Obama plays the insistent man of action. When the Senate, exercising its advise and consent role under the Constitution, rejected his nominee for the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, he simply appointed him to the post and declared, “I will not take no for an answer.” In other words, when the Constitution allows another branch of government – or anyone else – to tell him “no,” Obama will just override the Constitution.
But to properly understand the current situation and the attitude of President Obama, we need to take a look at history, when there was another president with an agenda no less ambitious than President Obama’s, and a vision to transform our country and its government. Just like President Obama, this new president faced a divided government, with the Senate in his party’s hands, but the House in the control of a leadership which opposed most of his agenda.
That president was Ronald Reagan. But unlike President Obama, Ronald Reagan didn’t vilify his opponents or impugn their patriotism. President Reagan didn’t play the petulant victim, and he didn’t pick up his marbles and retreat into the White House. Instead, President Reagan chose to govern as a leader rather than as a potentate. He chose to reach across the aisle to those on the other side – and keep reaching out, even when the other side slapped back.
Reagan chose the hard work of negotiation and compromise, rather than issuing political ultimatums and ordering around the opposition. As a result, President Reagan achieved unprecedented legislative success with his transformative policy agenda, working with precisely the same partisan composition of Congress that has utterly confounded President Obama.
In my view, the secret of Reagan’s success was a subtle character trait that seems to completely elude President Obama. It wasn’t his self-deprecating humor or his gifts of communication, though those undoubtedly helped as well. Rather, it was President Reagan’s capacity to extend respect to those on all side of an issue, to adversaries and allies alike. President Reagan didn’t see himself as better than his opponents and certainly not above the strictures of the Constitution. Reagan frequently appealed directly to the American people to convince Congress of the rightness of his policies, but he never cast doubt on the legitimacy of Congress’s role, he never assaulted the character or personal motivations of the other side, and he never gave up on working with any adversary whom he might convert into an ally.
President Obama, on the other hand, seems to have a compulsive need to lecture others, to denigrate others’ motivations and character, to assert the superiority of his position, intellect and ethics. Rather than honestly acknowledge the validity and viability of the opposition’s point of view, he routinely sets up straw men and dishonestly attributes absurd positions to those who disagree with him.
As President Reagan taught us, true leadership requires sublime character and hard work. Sadly, President
Obama has chosen the easy way out, attacking his opponents, staking out absolutist positions, and looking for backdoor solutions to advance his agenda that conflict with both democratic will and constitutional restraint.
As a result, President Obama is achieving a remarkable paradox: he is shrinking the moral authority of his office even as he seeks to radically expand its power.
Big Government
