President Trump's first week in office
has been marked by two things: controversy (over things like his inaugural
crowd size and voter fraud accusations), and executive orders. The first is old
hat for Trump. But for casual observers and even some political junkies who
are paying close attention to Trump's policy moves the second might be a
little foreign. Trump signed two more executive orders on Friday,
attempting to fulfill his promise of “extreme vetting” to keep potential
“radical Islamic terrorists” out of the United States.
So what is an executive action or executive
order? And how unusual is what Trump is doing with them? Below, an explainer. What
is an executive order?Basically, an executive order is an official statement
from the president about how the federal agencies he oversees are to use
their resources. It falls under the broader umbrella of “executive
actions,” which derive their power from Article II of the
Constitution, and it is the most formal executive action. Executive actions
also include presidential memorandums (which are a step below executive orders
and basically outline the administration's position on a policy issue),
proclamations and directives.
An executive order is not the president
creating new law or appropriating new money from the U.S. Treasury both
things that are the domain of Congress; it is the president instructing the
government how it is to work within the parameters that are already set by
Congress and the Constitution.Trump's executive order on building a border
wall, for example, basically establishes building the wall as a federal
priority and directs the Department of Homeland Security to use
already-available funding to get the ball rolling on its construction.
The president's executive orders are recorded
in the Federal Register and are considered binding, but they are subject to
legal review. (More on that next.) How can a president do this? In a word:
carefully. Executive orders have often been the subject of controversy, with
the opposition party accusing the president of overstepping his authority and
acting like a dictator. Basically, they're arguing that he's changing the
law rather than working within it.
This came up most recently after former
president Barack Obama signed executive orders exempting the children of
illegal immigrants and parents of legal children from deportation. They are
known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals or DACA and Deferred Action
for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents or DAPA. The plans would shield about 4 million
undocumented immigrants from deportation, but Republican governors and
attorneys general have sued, alleging that Obama was essentially implementing
immigration reform on his own overstepping his authority. In June, the
Supreme Court deadlocked, leaving a federal judge's ruling blocking the
programs in place.
And questions have already arisen about
the legality of an early Trump executive order involving illegal immigration:
his order denying federal funding to sanctuary cities. Expect a court
fight there, too. What is the history of executive orders? They have been
around for as long as we've had presidents, in fact all the way back to
George Washington.
Since Ronald Reagan was first elected, in
1980, every new American President has met with his Mexican counterpart shortly
after winning the White House. Reagan travelled to Mexico before his swearing
in and welcomed Mexican President José López Portillo to Washington later that
year. George H. W. Bush met with Carlos Salinas de Gortari, in Houston, in
November, 1988, before either man was sworn in as President. Bill Clinton met
with President Salinas, in Austin, before Clinton’s Inauguration. George W.
Bush, who already had a relationship with President Vicente Fox, made Mexico
his first foreign destination as President. Obama met with President Felipe
Calderón, in Washington, shortly before his swearing in.
Despite his well-known hostility toward
Mexico, Donald Trump planned on keeping this tradition alive. Last Saturday, in
his first public announcement from the White House, Sean Spicer, Trump’s press
secretary, noted that Mexican President Enrique Peña Nieto would visit Trump on
January 31st for a meeting “on trade, immigration, and security.” (This was after
Spicer finished berating the press for accurately reporting on the relatively
small crowd size at Trump’s Inauguration.)
This week, Peña Nieto dispatched several
ministers to lay the groundwork for the summit, including Luis Videgaray, his
new secretary of foreign affairs. Last fall, Videgaray, then the finance
minister, and one of the few people in Peña Nieto’s administration with links
to the Trump campaign, recommended that Peña Nieto invite Trump to Mexico.
Trump’s visit became such an embarrassment to the unpopular Mexican government
that Peña Nieto was forced to sack Videgaray.
But, after Trump won, Videgaray was welcomed
back into the government in his current role. “He was the only one who had
diplomatic ties to the Trump Administration,” an official at the Mexican
Embassy noted. On Wednesday, when Videgaray and his
colleagues came to the White House for a day of meetings with Jared Kushner and
other senior Trump aides, Trump signed one executive order calling
for “the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border” and another greatly
expanding the categories of undocumented immigrants who will be prioritized for
deportation.
The Embassy official said the team of diplomats at the White House
was furious and despondent at the timing. “They were like, ‘What the fuck are
we going to negotiate?’ ” the official said. “ ‘You’ve done the job.
What are we going to negotiate if you’ve signed this? What’s wrong with
you?’ ”Peña Nieto made an emotional televised
statement to his country on Wednesday evening condemning Trump’s executive orders.
“Mexico will not pay for any wall,” he said. He promised to turn Mexico’s fifty
consulates in the United States into “true ramparts in defense of migrant
rights.”The relationship between the two leaders completely ruptured yesterday.
In one of his first instances of Twitter diplomacy as President, Trump wrote on
Thursday morning, “If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall,
then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.” Not surprisingly, Peña
Nieto cancelled.
This depressing episode confirms several of
the worst fears about Trump. The first is that he is not a good negotiator.
Rather than waiting a week before he issued his executive orders on
immigration, Trump signed them at a moment that maximally embarrassed
Videgaray, the Mexican official who is the most sympathetic to him. The
moves left the unpopular Peña Nieto with no choice but to cancel next
week’s visit, and poisoned the relationship with one of America’s closest
allies and our third-largest trading partner.
Furthermore, it showed that with his
impulsive use of Twitter to make foreign-policy statements, Trump is turning
American diplomacy into a series of personal relationships unguided by strategy
or forethought. He praises foreign leaders who flatter him, such as Vladimir
Putin, and marginalizes those who criticize him, like Peña Nieto, without
regard to the strategic value of the relationship. He is turning foreign policy
into a version of professional wrestling, where alliances and rivalries shift
based on petty personal factors. At any moment, Trump is a tweet away from
creating an international conflagration.
The incident also made it clear that
congressional Republican leaders, who, during the Obama years, were vocal about
the President’s relationships with other countries, have no interest in
policing Trump’s foreign policy. At a press briefing in Philadelphia yesterday,
Speaker of the House Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who
casually announced that Congress would find some fifteen billion dollars to pay
for the border wall, had nothing to add about Trump’s detonation of the
U.S.-Mexico alliance. “The President can deal with his relationships with other
countries,” McConnell said.
Finally, and perhaps most important, Trump’s
treatment of Mexico reinforces an emerging world view that casts aside the
values at the center of American foreign policy since the Second World War. As
with his degrading comments about nato, his view that Taiwanese democracy
and independence is a negotiating chip with China, his cavalier attitude toward
Russia’s annexation of Crimea and meddling in Ukraine, his abandonment of the
Trans-Pacific Partnership without even a cursory consultation with allies in the
region who fear Chinese hegemony, his obsessions with the use of torture and
the seizure of Iraq’s oil fields, Trump’s views on U.S.-Mexico relations are
devoid of the liberal values that have kept Western democracies together for
decades.
During the Cold War, Reagan pushed Mexico to liberalize its economic
and political system and tried to bring the country closer to America and away
from any Communist-inspired Latin American movements. Both Bushes, Clinton, and
Obama made economic integration with Mexico a priority, and they all worked
toward humane immigration solutions. Trump, meanwhile, is treating Mexico like
a nineteenth-century colony. Other countries are watching, and the long-term
effect could be to gradually isolate us from the rest of the world. As the
official at the Mexican Embassy said, “He’s putting your country in boiling
water.”
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