Good Thursday evening. This is Daniel Allott with The Hill's Top Opinions.
Want to know what the next two years will look like in Washington? It'll involve lots of Oval Office ceremonies in which President Biden sits beside a stack of executive orders, carefully signing each to enact a regulatory agenda that otherwise couldn't muster bipartisan support in Congress, writes university professor STUART SHAPIRO.
In a pattern that "has become so common now that we may take it for granted," Democratic presidents whose party controls Congress focus on major legislation (see: Clinton, Obama, Biden). Then when that president loses one or both houses of Congress in his first midterm, instead of trying to work with Republicans in a divided Congress, he resorts to signing executive actions — what President Obama famously called "the pen and the phone."
This is particularly true with regulation as a policymaking device, argues Shapiro, who directs the Public Policy Program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University.
Shapiro believes Biden was bound to increasing his issuance of regulations regardless of the midterms results. But issuing regulations will now become his focus, giving the president, who insists he's running for reelection, "additional accomplishments beyond those that he achieved legislatively over the past two years."
Implementing that regulatory agenda will not be without obstacles, particularly in the form of a conservative Supreme Court, which could overturn Biden'' executive regulations.
"Unlike Presidents Obama and Clinton," he writes, "[Biden] faces a Supreme Court that is dominated by conservative jurists who are deeply skeptical of agency regulatory authority."
So, policymaking in Washington is about to return to a contest between the executive and judicial branches. "President Biden will wield his pen. And the Supreme Court will decide whether to allow his regulations to go into effect — probably before the ink dries."
Read Shapiro's op-ed here.
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