President Trump vows 'exciting executive orders

FPI / July 29, 2020

President Donald Trump issued five executive orders last week and has vowed more are to come as he presses his election-year agenda.

Vowing an "exciting" few weeks, Trump on Friday signed executive orders aimed at lowering prescription drug prices and eliminating illegal immigrants in the census count for reapportioning congressional seats.

Other executive orders are planned on immigration and health care, the White House said.

“The Supreme Court gave the president of the United States powers that nobody thought the president had,” Trump said recently.

Trump was "buoyed by a Supreme Court ruling that the White House believes has expanded the president’s power of the pen," Washington Times reporter Dave Boyer noted on July 26.

"Trump and his advisers believe the Supreme Court opened the door for longer-lasting unilateral executive actions with its 5-4 ruling on June 18, when the justices rejected the administration’s attempted rollback of President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals immigration program."

John Yoo, a George W. Bush administration official and now a professor at the University of California, Berkeley Law School, said the Supreme Court “has just laid out a road map for how, not just President Trump, but future presidents could enforce their own policies, just by not enforcing the immigration laws.”

Yoo said in an interview with the Washington Times that the high court’s majority upheld Obama’s right not to enforce immigration law; therefore, other presidents should be able to take similar actions in other policy areas.

“If the power is good for Obama — no matter what we thought of it, I thought it was wrong — the Supreme Court has blessed it now. Why isn’t that power good for President Trump, too?” Yoo said. “If the court says you can do this in immigration law, why can’t you do it in criminal justice? If the court really believes what it says, and this is not just an anti-Trump screed, then it has to apply to other areas as well.”

Yoo wrote an article detailing his views in the National Review, and Trump noticed it. He asked his advisers about it. High-ranking White House officials called Yoo.

“People from the White House called me after the article came out, and we had the same conversation you and I are having now,” Yoo said told the Washington Times. “ ‘How does it work? You really think you could do this?’ I said the same thing: If you just take DACA out and replace it with skills-based immigration, or you replaced it with taxes … the [court’s] opinion should apply outside the narrow case of DACA. Otherwise, it’s not really an opinion founded on the law. It’s founded on politics.”

Yoo said the president could use the concept to declare, for example, a national right to carry firearms.

He also said he discussed with White House advisers the president’s options for deploying federal forces to cities such as Portland.

The president obviously agrees with Yoo’s reasoning.

“The decision by the Supreme Court on DACA allows me to do things on immigration, on health care, on other things that we’ve never done before,” Trump told Fox News’ Chris Wallace last week. “And you’re going to find it to be a very exciting two weeks.”

A list of Trump's recent presidential actions can be seen here

Free Press International