Category Archives: Obama Approval Rating

The worry, however, is that Obama will be so focused on reaching out to Republican leaders that he will be either uninterested in or afraid of being confrontational in his executive actions.

“The question is not can Obama do things,” Silvers told HuffPost. “The question is will he? Will the administration do the things it can do?”

First Thing: Take On the Banks

The president of the United States oversees a massive regulatory apparatus that, when wielded appropriately, can help level the playing field for the middle class.

And nowhere it that more necessary right now than in the financial world. The recent financial reform legislation, known as Dodd-Frank, created a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and gave regulators new authorities they have yet to use.  Continue…

Fill In Dodd-Frank’s Blanks

“Because Dodd-Frank left so many things to the regulators, in truth much of the bill has yet to be written,” Damon Silvers told HuffPost.

“There is very significant delegation to the administrative agencies to figure out how they’re going to carry out the spirit of the law,” said Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen. And because regulatory implementation “plays to the strength of the insiders,” as Weissman puts it, the process “will require a commitment by the administration to stand up to powerful corporate interests”

“Dodd-Frank is being lobbied to death all over again,” Kuttner said. “You’ve got a handful of labor and consumer lobbyists going against hundreds of industry lawyers. If you were willing to be publicly tough on Wall Street, you could turn that into decent politics.”

Climate Change and Immigration

Cap and trade legislation and comprehensive immigration reform are two of the most obvious casualties of the rise to power of House Republicans. But some progressives think Obama could unilaterally make progress in both areas.

“I think there will be a lot of action on the executive front,” said longtime Washington observer Norman Ornstein, the American Enterprise Institute’s house liberal. And at the head of his list is the area of carbon emissions.

“The Supreme Court has basically given the EPA the authority to regulate carbon emissions,” Ornstein explained. In theory that means Obama could impose a cap and trade system solely by executive authority.

“It won’t work that way,” Ornstein said. But Obama’s EPA could go part way, by focusing on regulations for utilities — or the president could use the threat of EPA action as leverage on getting some kind of energy bill through Congress after all.       Continue…

Even Campaign Finance?

There’s zero chance a Republican House is going to limit money in politics. But Obama on his own could roll back some of the excesses of the 2010 election.

The Supreme Court’s January decision in Citizens United allowed, among other things, for nonprofit groups to spend unlimited amounts of anonymous money on campaign ads.   Continue…

Enforcement and Rulemaking

“The main thing I would recommend is enforcement — much more vigorous enforcement,” said Rena Steinzor, a law professor at the University of Maryland and president of the pro-regulation Center for Progressive Reform. “The laws are so under-enforced that you could make a lot of progress in terms of health and safety hazards through tougher enforcement.”

More aggressive civil and criminal prosecutions would have particularly dramatic effects, she said, in areas like mine safety, imported food, Clean Water Act violations and dirty coal-fired power plants.   Continue…

Foreign Policy and the Commander In Chief

One area where a Republican House doesn’t put a crimp on Obama’s plans is foreign policy — and some progressives are hoping the president rededicates himself to some of the agenda he described during the 2008 campaign.

Steve Clemons, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, is hopeful that Obama will reinvigorate the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, ideally by getting rid of the “status quo incrementalists” currently on his national security staff. “He’s got to do something other than this tired, constantly defeated set of negotiations,” Clemons said.

As for Afghanistan, congressional Republicans “are going to complain about whatever he does, so he might as well do the smart thing,” Clemons said. “He should realize he’s in a Vietnam War moment, and reduce and refocus the mission.”    Continue…

Odds and Ends

Robert Kuttner recently advocated in the American Prospect on behalf of two presidential measures: Stepped up enforcement of existing labor laws that prohibit such things as phony classifications of workers as temps or contract hires; and the establishment of new rules for government contracting to reward good labor practices and punish scofflaws.

Taking a stand on behalf of decent wages for workers, Kuttner said, isn’t just good policy. “It also has the virtue of getting him on the side of ordinary people, which he doesn’t seem to be too good at the optics of.”   Continue…

A New Crew

And of course Obama could clean house.

“The single best thing he could do is fire [Treasury Secretary Tim] Geithner,” Kuttner said. “Get some people in there who speak for Main Street.”

Even if he doesn’t fire anyone, there are plenty of resignations to deal with. “The question is going to be: Are they trying to send a message by bringing in business executives and insiders and maybe a smattering of Republicans?” Weissman asked. “Or are they bringing in independent voices who will aggressively enforce the law against corporate wrongdoers and deal with the very serious problems the country’s facing?”

The Limits Of Executive Power

There is, then, an awful lot Obama can do without having to strike a deal with speaker-to-be John Boehner. But there are limits to his executive power.

Congress, after all, controls the purse strings. And aside from what can be accomplished through changes in trade policy and jawboning, as noted above, job creation generally costs money.

“I think the big challenge for the president is that he has to focus on the economy, and that’s a concern that requires a lot of bigger items than you can do just through executive authority,” Tanden said.   Continue…