Benjamin Studebaker


Tag: Executive Action

How Trump’s Executive Actions are Like Obama’s–And How They’re Not

President Trump is fed up with everyone and everything. For months now, congress has refused to implement his agenda. He’s mad as hell and he’s not going to take it anymore. Does that sound like someone you know? It should–late in his presidency, Barack Obama became exasperated with years of Republican obstruction. He turned to his lawyers. What could the administration do unilaterally that might be legal? They threw the kitchen sink at it, trying all sorts of things and leaving it to the courts to decide what would stick. Like Trump, Obama began taking more executive action late in the first year, though most of his biggest and boldest moves came in the second term:

The fact that Trump is frustrated and is looking for ways to weasel around institutional impediments shouldn’t surprise us. When the Supreme Court got in Franklin Roosevelt’s way, he tried to pack the court with sycophants:

What’s interesting is how transparently bad this executive action is.

Read the rest of this entry »

So Far Trump Has Been No Worse Than Expected–It’s Senate Dems Who are the Problem

Immediately after the election of President Trump, I wrote a post about what Trump was likely to do once in office. Many people this week have seemed surprised by Trump’s executive actions, but they conform remarkably well with what I anticipated. In this post I want to summarize what we’ve seen so far and what it indicates about where things are going.

Read the rest of this entry »

Immigration: What Obama Did and Why He Did It

I’ve had a few readers ask me to do a piece explaining US President Barack Obama’s recent executive action on immigration. I’ll aim to explain what Obama did, why Obama did what he did, and whether or not what Obama did was legal.

Read the rest of this entry »