For the past two years the political left and the media have been warning the American people that election-reform laws passed by a number of red states pose a threat to American democracy. We disagree with that assessment and contend that the real threat to democracy is the progressives’ demands that President Biden bypass Congress and greatly expand his use of executive orders.
It’s a trend that began with President I’ve-got-pen-and-a-phone Obama.
Frustrated that he couldn’t get his agenda through Congress, he decided to bypass Congress and greatly expand the scope of executive orders. For example, Obama’s 2012 executive action known as the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) essentially granted temporary legal status to some 650,000 young immigrants, now referred to as “the Dreamers.”
Then in 2014, Obama took an even bigger executive action with the Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. Citizens and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA), essentially granting temporary legal status to the undocumented parents of children who were U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents. The courts struck down this anti-democratic overreach.
In addition, Obama took it upon himself to make treaties without sending them to the U.S. Senate, where he knew they would be voted down.
The Institute for Policy Innovation warned at the time that this unconstitutional effort to expand executive power would set a precedent that future presidents, Republican and Democrat, would be tempted to follow when faced with congressional roadblocks to their agenda.
Now that Biden’s agenda faces just such a roadblock, progressives in the House have released their wish list for presidential executive orders, which includes canceling student debt for 45 million Americans, imposing price controls on certain prescription drugs, implementing their climate change agenda, “advancing immigrants’ rights,” and many more actions.
These progressives’ demands would be by far the greatest expansion of executive power in U.S. history, because it would bypass and undermine the role of the 535 members of the U.S. House and Senate, who were elected by the people and empowered by the Constitution to make laws and approve treaties.
States and Congress have the right to make changes to the election process, assuming they are constitutional changes. That’s representative democracy.
Demands the president bypass states and Congress because progressives can’t pass their agenda isn’t democracy. It’s autocracy.
May 3, 2022