The following article by Kenneth T. Walsh was posted on the U.S. News and World Report website June 16, 2017:
Trump’s inability to enact his agenda shows the system is working.
It can be frustrating and infuriating for activist presidents when they find themselves seemingly thwarted at every turn. But the built-in limits on presidential power – our American system of checks and balances – are there for a good reason, and they are working as intended.
Checks and balances were designed by the founders to serve as a brake on excessive government influence, which has been a deep concern in the United States from the very beginning of the Republic. Despite President Donald Trump’s protestations that he is being unfairly blocked in attempting to implement his agenda, the system is operating properly.
Congress and the courts are imposing limits on Trump in various ways. The Senate may yet end Trump’s efforts to overhaul the health-care system. And both the House and Senate are not accepting most of Trump’s budget priorities including his proposals to cut taxes and his plan to build a wall along America’s southern border to keep out illegal immigrants.
The judiciary has stalled Trump’s plans to limit travel from several major Muslim-dominated countries. This week, a second federal appeals court – the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco – ruled against Trump’s revised travel ban, joining the Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in Richmond., Va. The Supreme Court is considering whether to hear the case. These developments are particularly galling to the president because he argues that he is within his constitutional role to use executive powers in protecting the nation. And he made that his central theme earlier this month amid the first reports of a new and lethal terrorist attack in London. “We need to be smart, vigilant and tough,” he wrote on Twitter. “We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!” But this is the way the system is supposed to work: slowing down what may be rash, rushed, revolutionary or reactionary decisions, and forcing the policy makers to work deliberately and make changes gradually.
The news media also play a part in this system of incrementalism by holding the president, Congress and the judiciary accountable. That’s a big reason why the First Amendment was invented–to protect freedom of the press and freedom of speech, and provide independent information about the three branches of government. In today’s terms, the media are putting a brake on Trump’s “change agenda” by calling attention to inconsistencies, flip-flops and outright falsehoods in what Trump says. The news media have become “one of our defenses against this guy,” says presidential historian Robert Dallek. “It’s the Fourth Estate, and it’s doing its job.”
In the constitutional democracy that the founders invented, stability is key. Massive change is not supposed to be easy. And it’s not.
One branch of government is not supposed to utterly dominate the others. And it doesn’t.
A single individual, even the president, is not empowered to run roughshod over everyone and everything. And, blessedly, he can’t.
Much of this opposition derives from Trump’s low status with the public. Less than 40 percent of Americans approve of his job performance, according to most polls. This rating is historically low for any new president, who usually benefits from an initial period of goodwill. And the low rating discourages members of Congress from backing Trump’s policies.
That’s not to say that Trump is a “pitiful, helpless giant,” to borrow the late President Richard Nixon’s phrase. He can change policies by using his executive powers, and he has done so. Trump is attempting to end or reduce many regulations that he says impose unfair and damaging burdens on business. In foreign affairs, he has withdrawn the United States from the climate-change agreement known as the Paris accord. He seems eager to void U.S. trade agreements that he says aren’t fair to the United States. He is reducing the emphasis on diplomacy, failing to fill many jobs at the State Department, as he pursues his “America First” agenda around the world. All this could have a big impact. U.S. allies, especially Germany, are concerned that the United States will no longer be a reliable ally, and are talking about going it alone or finding alliances elsewhere. But Trump’s core supporters are delighted that he is thumbing his nose at countries who haven’t been paying their fair share of defense and other costs associated with alliances with the United States.
The checks and balances system is getting support from unexpected places. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was nominated by Trump earlier this year and joined the high court in April, told a Harvard forum June 2, “I know there is a lot of criticism about government and the rule of law today but I don’t share it.” Gorsuch went on to praise the American system in which the “government can lose in its own courts and accept the judgment of those courts. …That is a heritage that is very special.”
Political scientist Ross Baker of Rutgers says, “I think that the ‘auxiliary precautions’ to which [founder] James Madison referred … separation of powers and checks and balances, are working reasonably well but they’ve yet to be really tested in this situation.” Baker notes: “So long as executive orders and personnel changes are put forth as evidence of the output of the Trump administration, he has racked up some achievements, but those are not the true measure of the accomplishments of a president. His legislative accomplishments, setting aside confirmations by the Senate, are anemic. History will judge him by his legislative notches not proclamations and executive orders.”
View the post here.