From “Pen and Phone” to “Pretty Big Shift”
Remember back in 2014 when President Barack Obama said that he would conduct his presidency by “pen and phone”? He said that after he had lost control of Congress and was no longer able to pass legislation. His new idea was that he would continue to advance progressive goals by fiat: by executive order or just by doing things through the murky workings of the Administrative State.
It was this unilateral pen-and-phone approach that launched, for example, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. DACA might sound like a formal thing, like some sort of actual statutory program, and yet it was mere freelancing; it represented the policy preferences of the Obama administration and nothing more.
Indeed, at the same time, the 44th president proceeded with other pen-and-phone gambits. As tabulated by the Cato Institute’s…