What will Trump do with Obama's presidential legacy

Trump will be able to undo Obama's initiatives, and many of them quite easily. Photo: donaldjtrump.com

Last week, the Mandarin Oriental, a fashionable Washington hotel, hosted an 3-day conference where George Soros and other wealthy liberals who spent tens of millions of dollars trying to elect Hillary Clinton as president, licked their wounds and planned to sabotage the changes that promises in the first 100 days of his reign Donald Trump.

“Donald Trump will erase the Obama era,” is the headline of an article by Jordan Weissman on the progressive site Slate.

The author, who calls the new US president an "ignorant demagogue", writes that he will "begin by dismantling the Obama era, which allowed America to take the first real steps towards a more progressive, humane government after 3 decades of conservative political dominance."

As the program for the Washington event said, the Republican is going to launch a "monstrous onslaught on President Obama's achievements and on our progressive vision of a just country."

All presidential decrees

To keep this onslaught by the supporters of Obama will be difficult. Photo: donaldjtrump.com

His historical legacy will begin to fade on January 20 of 2017, when Trump can, in a matter of hours with one stroke of a pen, cancel all 235 presidential decrees signed by Obama since the beginning of his reign.

The beauty of these bylaws lies in the fact that they do not need to be approved by Congress, which is sometimes stubborn. Many presidents issued similar decrees, but Obama outdid them all.

He, for example, issued as a presidential decree a US signature under the Paris Treaty on Combating Climate Change, a lot of orders of the Federal Environmental Protection Agency, a de facto amnesty for several categories of illegal immigrants, the abolition of some sanctions against Iran and a ban on harsh interrogation methods. This technique allowed him to make many important decisions without looking back at the Congress.

A flaw in such a reception is that the next president can cancel presidential decrees a few minutes after his inauguration.

As the Washington Post wrote last week, "Obama's legacy is vulnerable because the 44th president relied too much on administrative decisions to bypass Congress...."

The Republican congressional faction regularly complained that the White House was abusing this method and accused Obama of violating the constitution, which, for example, stipulates that international treaties must be approved by the legislature.

Trump vs Global Warming

Now Trump will have the opportunity to cancel all the decrees of Obama, who angered the Republican faction. Take at least Obama's initiatives in the field of environmental protection.

Photo: donaldjtrump.com

Representatives of more than 200 countries gathered last week at a summit in Morocco and reaffirmed their determination to implement the Treaty of Paris, which officially entered into force on November 4. It is designed to prevent further heating of the planet by more than 2 degrees Celsius.

Trump is threatening to abolish it and “get rid of the Department of Environmental Protection in almost all forms.”

In particular, Trump is going to cancel the Clean Energy Plan adopted by his predecessor, which provides for a sharp reduction in greenhouse gas emissions from power plants.

“The EPA is killing these energy companies!” Trump said during the election campaign.

Having won, he appointed head of the preparation for the reception of affairs at the office of Myron Ebel, who leads the program for studying climate in one of the analytical centers of Washinton and is a well-known climate skeptic.

Trump himself tweeted in 2012: “The concept of global heating was invented by the Chinese to make American manufacturers uncompetitive.”

“Global warming is an expensive fake,” he wrote two years later.

Trump is unable to “abolish” the Paris Treaty, signed by almost all countries on the planet. The United States can only withdraw from it itself. It will take 4 years, but the Trump administration can simply ignore it. The agreement does not provide for penalties for this.

Congress will also deal with the elimination of the Obama legacy, which may repeal the hundreds of edicts issued by the federal departments during the last period of the Obama administration. For example, this Thursday one of the ministries issued a decree restricting the release of methane in oil and gas production on state land and on Indian reservations. Oilmen called this measure excessive and costly.

After January 20, Congress will be able to cancel it. If Hillary Clinton had been elected president, she would have certainly imposed a veto on the abolition of the veto. But the Americans elected Trump.

Obamacare is a prime target

Photo: whitehouse.gov

Cancellation of orders of the current government will be very time consuming. On Thursday, the administration released another batch of regulations and rules covering all aspects of American life and occupying as many 527 pages. In this regard, their number has reached 81 640 pages this year, and the year is not over yet.

According to the calculations of Clyde Wayne Cruise from the conservative Institute of Competitive Entrepreneurship, if it does, then by the end of 2016, their total number will grow to 92 830 pages.

Cruise hopes that Trump will fulfill his promise and drastically reduce the number of bureaucratic rules that, according to him, hang like a dead weight on the neck of the American economy.

There is a precedent. Under Democrat Jimmy Carter they occupied the 73 258 pages. Reagan, who replaced him, reduced their number to 44 812, Cruise says.

Trump's main target will be Obama's medical reform - Obamacare, as both sides began to call it. Since it was passed by Congress, Trump cannot abolish it by presidential decree, although he can immediately repeal a number of Obama's accompanying regulations. He will need to appeal to Congress to cancel the reform.

Since both houses of Congress remained in the hands of Republicans, Obamacare seems doomed. On the other hand, Trump has already partly backed down and spoke out against the abolition of popular Obama reform’s 2 points.

He also reversed the issue of illegal immigrants, all of which he had long threatened to deport 11 millions, and at first became a favorite of the race mainly due to this threat. Now Trump is already talking about the deportation of 2-3 million criminal illegal immigrants, although this figure was taken from the ceiling.

According to the US Migration Policy Institute, several hundred thousand illegal immigrants have been convicted of criminal offenses. In any case, it will not be possible to quickly expel millions of people from the country, the New York Times notes, because there are already not enough personnel in immigration courts, through which it will be necessary to issue deportations.

Prisoners are not enough for such a mob of prisoners.

“Trump may not have a clue about legal procedures or turn a blind eye to them, but they are there,” the newspaper writes.

The progressive Weissman quoted above laments that under Trump, “in many ways it will seem as if the previous 8 years never happened.” This is not entirely true. It is very difficult to expand such a colossus as the USA. But Trump, especially at first, will try.

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