Perspectives: Trump's COVID-19 Executive Actions
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From the Left
Op-Ed: Trump just made another huge and illegal power grab. Be very alarmedPresident Trump doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about the most basic principle of American government: Power is divided among three branches of government. The president does not possess legislative power, yet on Saturday Trump signed a series of executive orders that were clearly in the purview of the legislative, not the executive branch.
From the Right
The Return of Pen-and-Phone ConstitutionalismPresident Trump’s executive actions for COVID relief offer little relief but are constitutionally dangerous.
On Saturday, President Trump put his name to four executive actions — three presidential memoranda and one executive order — intended to offer some relief to Americans dealing with the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The premise of these actions, made explicit in the text of each, was that Congress had failed to act and now the chief executive has to step in. It is a premise fundamentally at odds with the logic of our...
From the Center
Trump’s actions on pandemic relief aren’t illegal. They’re just ineffective.Within hours of President Trump’s announcement Saturday that his administration would provide pandemic-related relief to millions of Americans, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle assailed the move as yet another instance of presidential overreach. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) — who don’t agree on much — settled on the same phrase to describe the president’s actions: “unconstitutional slop.”
That’s understandable — but wrong. Trump has so often exceeded normal limits on presidential authority that it is easy to assume unlawfulness on his part. But...
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