Obama Urges Trump to Not Overuse Executive Orders

On Tuesday, November 8, 2016, the American voter issued a referendum on the Obama presidency. They denied his party control of all three branches of government and sent his fiercest opponent to the White House.

Most of what Obama was able to accomplish in the last few years of his presidency were through executive orders — orders that Trump will be able to dismantle on day one. Now, Obama is asking that Trump moderate his usage of executive order in a last-ditch effort to preserve his legacy.

In an interview with NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Thursday that aired in its entirety Monday on Morning Edition, Obama said it’s preferable to work with Congress.

“Keep in mind, though, that my strong preference has always been to legislate when I can get legislation done,” Obama said from the Cabinet Room in the White House. “In my first two years, I wasn’t relying on executive powers, because I had big majorities in the Congress and we were able to get bills done, get bills passed. And even after we lost the majorities in Congress, I bent over backwards consistently to try to find compromise and a legislative solution to some of the big problems that we’ve got — a classic example being immigration reform, where I held off for years in taking some of the executive actions that I ultimately took in pursuit of a bipartisan solution — one that, by the way, did pass through the Senate on a bipartisan basis with our help.”

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“So my suggestion to the president-elect is, you know, going through the legislative process is always better, in part because it’s harder to undo,” he said.

“And that doesn’t mean, though, that he is not going to come in and look at the various agencies and see the rules we’ve passed and if he wants to reverse some of those rules, that’s part of the democratic process. That’s, you know, why I tell people to vote because it turns out elections mean something.”

Luckily for Trump, Obama’s hypocrisy is mostly irrelevant. Trump won’t have to rely on executive orders to run the government, because — unlike Obama — his party also controls the legislature.

She incorrectly speaks of the executive orders of past presidents, but a great reaction:

Source: Breitbart