Conservative says: Obama has executive order strategy that works

Though President Obama’s executive orders issued this past week on gun controls will only have a modest impact, they invoked an emotional debate between the left and the right.

Republicans who felt stymied by the president’s move were especially outraged that he used the executive order process, just as they were flummoxed when Obama altered deportation methods to spare many more “Dreamers” – kids born in America to illegal immigrant parents.

That immigration "EO," as they’re called in Washington circles, currently faces a challenge in the courts and Obama’s attempt to redefine licensed gun dealers and which gun buyers must face a background check will also become mired in the courts.

Conservative groups wrongly assume that the president abuses the EO process at every turn, using those unique powers more frequently than his predecessors. The graph below (which was created in June 2014) shows otherwise.

Conservative columnist Dennis Lennox, while ascribing possible Nixonian motives to Obama’s method of going around Congress, nonetheless expresses a frustrating degree of admiration for the president’s political maneuvers. 

In a guest Op-Ed for The Detroit News, Lennox points out that Obama’s timing on new gun rules prevents the GOP-controlled Congress from swiftly intervening through the budgetary process and it makes a Supreme Court challenge a bittersweet avenue for recriminations because no high court ruling on the newest EO will come before Obama leaves 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Here’s a bit of the thinking by Lennox, a freelance writer:   

“Obama masterfully appeased his left-wing base, while at the same time appealed to the sensible independents who value problem-solving politics over ideological warfare, by bemoaning the Republican congressional majority and casting them as being bought and paid for by ‘the gun lobby.’

“If that sounds familiar it should.

“Obama used the same messaging — that he was solving critical problems Congress refused to address — in past executive action granting legal status (aka amnesty) to over 4 million illegal immigrants and failing to defend (in court) the then-law of the land on the definition of marriage.

“And he keeps using the tactic because it works.”