Conservatives: If You Can’t Win the Presidency, Make It Weaker

Fang Zhe/Xinhua/ZUMAPress

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


It’s one thing to expand executive powers when your guy is in the White House—but what if the other party holds the Oval Office? That’s what elite conservative legal minds were mulling at an American Enterprise Institute event Friday headlined “Founders betrayed? New threats to US democracy and rule of law.” Conservative luminaries, including Bush-era torture-justifier John Yoo, warned of a grave constitutional threat in the Obama administration’s use of executive power.

CATO institute fellow Nicholas Rosenkranz said Obama had seized a “vast amount of executive power” by allowing people who entered the country illegally as children to stay (though as my colleague Adam Serwer pointed out last summer, presidents from both parties have long claimed the authority to grant stays of deportation). He was also concerned about the possibility that the DOJ may decline to enforce federal drug laws in states that recently legalized pot. (This coming from the same school of thought that says the 10th amendment allows states to ignore federal laws they don’t like.) “For those of you who are nervous about some of the tendencies of of this particular president,” Rosencranz said, “I would keep your eye on the executive choices like declining to execute law.”

He said Congress should clarify that the president must enforce federal laws. Would this, then, apply to Obamacare under a “President Ryan in 2017,” asked moderator Henry Olson, director of AEI’s National Research Initiative. Well, yes, Rosencranz said—yes, it would.

Yoo argued that the “progressive movement’s” usurpation of power in the executive branch has been snowballing for years, starting with Woodrow Wilson’s wartime mobilization, and expanding with FDR’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. He labeled the Obama administration the “4th wave” of progressivism, its “pinnacles” being Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform law. Yoo said that in order to counter a liberal expansion of executive power, conservatives needed to abandon their own, Reagan-era tactic of broadening the president’s authority:

The “‘Reagan Revolution in law’ was built on certain kinds of assumptions about the way government worked, where the primary enemy to reducing the burden on liberty was Congress, and the primary protector was going to be the presidency, particularly through using the president’s power to centralize control over the agencies. So that led to a number of doctrines that the Reagan administration and those that followed pursued, such as trying to keep strict barriers on the way Congress could enact legislation, trying to protect a fairly large area of exececutive discretion… and keeping the courts out of the business of reviewing regulations.”

It only so happened that at the time, the White House was in Republican hands and Congress was dominated by Democrats. Some legislative fixes Yoo  floated: backtracking on the 1984 Chevron doctrine that the courts must defer to “reasonable agency interpretations” of the law; enacting legislation to require Congressional review for major agency rules; and putting new regulations through a cost-benefit analysis.

He offered other, “more mischievous” options too: 

“Why not have agency budgets subject to reduction in proportion to the amount it costs the economy? If you enact a rule that costs a certain amount to the economy, then the agency’s budget also falls by a similar amount. Or the number of jobs lost in the economy that year—that’s the amount federal employment as a whole will go down. This will focus the… bureaucrats.”

To be clear, though, all this talk of hemming in the White House? It doesn’t apply to things like going to war, Guantanamo, or, presumably, torturing detainees. “I’m not taking about executive power in regards to foreign affairs,” Yoo said, “which I think is wholly different.” 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate