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It wasn’t originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington’s example and gotten false teeth.
Alt text:
It wasn’t originally constitutionally required, but presidents who served two terms have traditionally followed George Washington’s example and gotten false teeth.
They were administrative repeats, minus the sex scandal.
Trade deals and bailouts and immigrant witch hunts and government shut downs and echoes of a prior war that they never managed to clean up. Both presidents focused themselves on the project of further privatization, with Clinton giving us HMOs and Obama delivering the ACA. Both presided over tech booms, which were promised as a panacea to poor wage growth. Both squandered their majorities and frittered away their executive authority, while the market economy swelled and the labor economy sagged. Both ushered in fascist televangelists because they couldn’t improve the material conditions of their constituents.
One big difference was that Clinton enacted Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, while Obama was much friendlier in general to LGBTQ people and their rights. In my opinion, Obama was a better communicator, but that might be because he was speaking at a generally higher level and communicating policy and law rather than empathy. They had different approached to law, and I definitely preferred Obama’s.
Unfortunately, under a fundamentally capitalist system, there’s not a lot that can be done to make sure real wages grow for the workers, aside from a strong NLRB and having solid pro-union policies.
Here’s an area I very, very strongly disagree on. I oppose a strong executive branch that can enact edict without oversight. I believe the gov’t branches should largely be equal, and Obama went too far in uses of presidential power, which Trump then expanded on. That’s an awful precedent. We revolted against Britain for a good reason, and I would prefer to not see a need for American Revolution Pt II.
Clinton enacted DADT with the blessing of the liberal movement while Obama dragged his feet on gay marriage until long after the SCOTUS had ruled on Obergefell v Hodges. The Respect for Marriage Act wasn’t even Obama’s legislation. It was signed in 2022 under Biden.
Sure there is. The US Federal Government is the largest employer in the country. If the President wants to raise wages, one of the most straightforward decisions he can make is to simply raise starting salaries for government workers. This instantly puts upward pressure on the national wage rate, makes federal jobs more desirable, and improves the economic conditions of millions of federal workers.
In fact, this is one of Obama’s few direct actions. He signed an EO raising base pay for federal workers to $10.10 back in 2014. A meager improvement, particularly when national cost-of-living had long since exceeded what amounts to a $20k/year salary. But hey? Notably better than $7.25.
That’s cool. Your opinion doesn’t matter. You have no control over the extent to which Presidents exercise their authority.
You might applaud Obama for spending eight years sitting on his hands and boo Trump for taking a direct and aggressive role in shaping national policy. But Obama’s fecklessness put no constraint on his successor. No more than Clinton’s limited Bush. No more than Hoover’s limited FDR.
Its a precedent that’s been in effect under dozens of prior administrations. You govern the country with the tools you’re given. Or you don’t. But there’s no reward for pulling a Calvin Coolidge or a Rutherford B. Hayes and sitting on the sidelines while your country circles the drain.
The only precedent you’ll have set is one in which your party gets booted from office when the people you’re selected to represent continue to suffer under conditions you failed to alleviate.
It’s a precedent because presidents take power–not use the power they were given–and then the courts eventually say, yeah, okay, we guess that the constitution doesn’t really apply here after all. Then it’s precedent for the next president to take even more power, and repeat. I give it the thumbs down because even though it means that a good president can use that power to accomplish good things, it means that a shitty president can use it to do enormous amounts of damage in a very, very short period of time. Supporting that kind of trash means that you’re handing the tools of your own demise to the people that want to tear down democracy. You can support that if you want; I won’t.
In point of fact, Obama’s restraint did put constraints on Trump. It meant that he had to go to court multiple times over things, and he lost on a lot. Like his Muslim ban; remember that? If Obama had greatly expanded executive power in the same way that Trump did, then Trump would have had far, far fewer court challenges to act as speed bumps.
Bush was given several literal blank checks during his two terms in office by a legislature that was more than happy to invest enormous power in the chief executive (so long as that executive was a Republican). The Patriot Act, the No Child Left Behind Act, the Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003, the Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2007, the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, and the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008 were all on the books before Obama took office.
They each invested the Presidency with new powers via the national bureaucracy, enormous slush funds through which to shape economic activity, and regulatory authorities only vaguely defined by the legislature that the President’s appointees could fine tune as they saw fit.
Trump’s trips to court were notable only in so far as they illustrated how toothless the modern judiciary is in the face of a Unitary Executive. Policies that failed to pass judicial muster were continued in defiance of court orders and over the objection of administrative bureaucracies - border wall funding and illegal incarceration of asylum seekers, kick-backs to private security firms and Homeland Security contractors, wildly illegal misuse of military assets in Iraq and Afghanistan and Eastern Europe and Latin America, leaking state secrets to foreign nationals, harassing and spying on minority groups and political opponents, using federal money for self-enrichment and as kick-backs to cronies, using federal money for campaigning in defiance of campaign finance laws - all ended up either being swept under the rug or continued under the incoming Biden Administration.
Obama did nothing to restrain Trump. In fact, Trump’s team deliberately pushed the boundaries of what was already generously afforded them just to see how other branches would respond. And the response was, more often than not, to ratify his actions after the fact - either at the national level or via state policies in red states that sympathized with him.
And it was dumb then, too. Republicans–in general–are more authoritarian, and are happy to cede more power to an executive. Dems then use the power when they take the executive branch. Which is stupid, because it allows Republicans to keep expanding the power of the executive.
…Which is literally part of my fucking point. A strong executive and weak legislative branch is bad, and using the power instead of getting rid of it means that someone that’s malicious has more tools at their disposal.
It’s fast and easy to break things. It takes a long time to fix things once they’re broken. A strong executive can break things far, far faster than a strong executive can fix them.