What’s All This Sudden Concern About Executive Power?

If you take in a steady diet of liberal media (not recommended), you’ll scarcely get through a day without hearing someone wring their hands about Donald Trump’s understanding of the U.S. Constitution. We’re not talking about the cesspools of Vox or Salon here; 60 Minutes even brought it up in an interview with House Speaker Paul Ryan. The nation’s top Republican had to sit there and reassure the interviewer that Trump was well aware of the government’s separation of powers.

It’s a shame no one ever put Barack Obama under the same microscope.

After eight years of his wanton tyranny, the party that would like the federal government to grow so powerful that it runs every American life is suddenly concerned about giving the president too much power. What a remarkable time to discover this concern.

It hardly needs to be said, but liberal Democrats don’t care one whit about limiting executive power…unless that executive power is in the hands of a Republican. Their hypocrisy is obvious, but these people have no shame; being called hypocrites will not deter them from their agenda.

What they’re about to find out, though, is that their hypocrisy comes at a tangible cost: Obama’s power is now Trump’s.

Oopsies!

Barack took office with every apparent intention of staying within the constitutional boundaries of his office. Of course, when your party controls both houses of Congress, it’s a lot more convenient to talk glowingly about the legislative process. It’s easy to be good when there are no temptations.

After the 2010 mid-terms, things changed drastically. Democrats were slaughtered, losing the House of Representatives and coming within a hair’s breadth of losing the Senate. Suddenly, Obama couldn’t just push whatever agenda he wanted through the Congress. And when he realized that, he started relying on that old presidential standby: executive action.

Nothing wrong with that – it’s there for a reason. But when you count up all of Obama’s executive orders, all of his regulatory rules, and all of his international “agreements,” you have a president who went far beyond any of his predecessors in writing domestic law from the Oval Office. With his infamous “pen and phone,” Obama skipped Congress whenever possible and came perilously close to turning the U.S. presidency into a monarchy.

Democrats didn’t care because Democrats were getting what they wanted. If Obama had discovered a way to bypass those damn obstructionist Republicans, bully for him! They shouldn’t have tried to stand in his way with their racist opposition!

The upside of all this: Trump can undo much of Obama’s agenda on his first day in office and Democrats can’t do a thing about it.

But hopefully, Trump will stop there. Hopefully, he’ll use his tenure in office to push some of Obama’s power back where it belongs. We can gripe about Congress all day long, but it’s better to see Capitol Hill in constant gridlock than to cede the nation’s control over to just one man. The left is about to learn that lesson the hard way.