David Shribman
This week's disclosure that the Obama administration is working on a major international environmental initiative is about more than climate change around the world. It stands as a potent symbol of how the political climate has changed in Washington.
This climate-change proposal, which may soon gather opposition from other poor countries, is designed to skirt the U.S. Constitutional provision that requires treaties to be ratified by a two-thirds majority of the Senate. Barack Obama's Democratic Party has only a 53-45 majority in the Senate, with two Independents who almost always vote with Mr. Obama.
That margin isn't even close to what Mr. Obama would require for a major environmental initiative, given the certain opposition of virtually all the Senate Republicans plus the possible opposition of the eight Democratic senators representing the coal-producing states of Virginia, West Virginia, Montana, North Dakota and Pennsylvania.
But more broadly, this initiative is another in a series of actions Mr. Obama has taken to bypass a Congress that, with a sturdy Republican majority in the House and a reluctant and slim Democratic majority in the Senate, has repeatedly foiled the President's hopes.
Mr. Obama has made so-called "recess appointments" to bodies such as the National Labor Relations Board to skirt Senate confirmation requirements. He has increased the minimum wage for federal employees without congressional approval. Moreover, he has vowed to bypass Congress on a number of other matters, including an overhaul of the nation's immigration laws and measures to curb emissions from coal-fired power plants.
The President has issued nearly 200 executive orders, unilateral actions that do not require congressional approval. This is not an unusual practice; Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were adept at this, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the all-time master. But what is unusual is the prominence of the issues that Mr. Obama addresses with executive orders.
This practice has raised stern opposition from Republicans, but it also has unsettled some Democrats. It also has prompted demands, especially from the talk-show right, for the impeachment of the President. Though Republican impatience with the President's actions is intense, only two presidents – Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton – have been impeached, and Republican leaders are exceedingly unlikely to pursue that forbidding course.
Even so, the President's intention to press on without Congress on important matters – his "I've got a pen" vow is particularly irksome to his Republican rivals – represents a fundamental change in the Washington calculus.
It can be traced to the increasing ideological discipline within the two major American political parties, both of which had both a conservative and liberal wing as recently as a third of a century ago – and vigorous intra-party ideological divides a half-century ago.
Perhaps the clearest example comes from the 1966 midterm elections, when Republican liberals such as Charles H. Percy of Illinois, Edward W. Brooke of Massachusetts, Mark O. Hatfield of Oregon, and Howard H. Baker Jr. of Tennessee were elected to the Senate while Nelson A. Rockefeller was re-elected governor of New York and Spiro T. Agnew was elected governor of Maryland. Some of these political figures, especially Mr. Agnew, moved to the right later but their political profile on Election Day had a distinctly moderate, if not a plainly liberal, tint.
In the same election, however, Ronald Reagan, who would become the leading American conservative of the 20th century, won his campaign to become governor of California. The emergence under the Republican umbrella of Mr. Reagan and Messrs. Brooke and Hatfield in the very election underlines the diversity within the Republican Party at the time.
Meanwhile, the 1966 midterms brought the re-election of Democratic conservatives such as Allen J. Ellender of Louisiana and James Eastland of Mississippi, both of whom voted a year earlier against the landmark Voting Rights bill, along with the re-election of Democratic Senators Fred R. Harris of Oklahoma and Walter F. Mondale of Minnesota, both signature liberals of the time.
The presence of both liberals and conservatives in both the Republican and Democratic parties was considered curious to political scientists but unremarkable to voters in 1966. A half-century on, such a condition would be considered remarkable to political scientists and curious to voters.
The new ideological rigidity of the parties has made it more difficult for presidents, particularly Mr. Obama, to win bipartisan support for much of anything, even routine ambassadorial appointments, which also require Senate approval.
Mr. Obama's environmental initiative is likely to raise objections on Capitol Hill, to say nothing of international forums, where newly industrializing nations recoil at strict regulations or worry that wealthier nations will not underwrite infrastructure improvements to cope with global warming.
As a result, his plan to proceed without Congress may represent the path of least resistance for him in this matter and others in 2014. But it also may be a path that presidents may find themselves taking in years to come.
David Shribman