TPM - Rule By Decree (well worth the read)

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/rule-by-decree

(my bolding below for emphasis - NRL)

By JOSH MARSHALL Published FEBRUARY 9, 2017, 4:31 PM EDT

We're not three weeks into the Trump presidency. It remains difficult to piece together the trends above the chaos and tergiversations of each successive day. But one trend should be in the process of becoming clear. Going into the Trump presidency the President and congressional Republicans promised an ambitious legislative agenda. And fast. At one point Paul Ryan suggested that Obamacare repeal and Medicare phaseout might start on inauguration day. In any case, few needed to be convinced. Republicans had unified control of the federal government and almost a decade of pent-up appetite for dramatic change - Obamacare repeal, corporate tax reform, a major income tax cut, repeal of Dodd-Frank, possibly privatization of major social insurance programs like Medicare, Social Security, Medicaid and more. And yet less than a month in, progress on Capitol Hill has slowed dramatically. President Trump meanwhile seems almost entirely focused on a steady stream of executive orders. These two developments are not unrelated. It looks very much like President Trump has found his presidential comfort-zone: rule by decree.

Of course, there are some important qualifiers. The American system doesn't work by presidential decrees. Congress and the courts can cleave back these actions. With Congress suppliant, the courts are showing that most clearly with his immigration executive order, to Trump's great displeasure. But in other cases the executive orders are more like Potemkin decrees, vague though legalistic proclamations which have limited impact or meaning or expressing changes that other administrations would simply do rather than grandly announce through what sometimes amount to proclamatory press releases.

As usual with Trump, the upshot is a mix of authoritarian tendencies on the one hand and flimflam and impatience on the other. But it hasn't been limited to the White House. It's operative on Capitol Hill too. It's time to notice that these two developments are linked, indeed inextricably so.

Senate Democrats' slow-rolling Trump nominees is jamming up the Senate, and clearly by design. The more time is chewed up in nomination fights, the less time is left for legislating and the more gets pushed into the 2018 election cycle. But were Senate Democrats to agree to unanimous consent today to approve every Trump nominee with a single vote, it's still not clear that the Senate would have anything ready to vote on tomorrow or any time soon. In other words, Democrats are having some success creating a legislative bottleneck. But there's no legislation jammed up behind it that could pass anyway.

snip - more to read.

best remaining lines -

"Presidential power operates by Presidents mobilizing popular support to push legislation through Congress. This requires both popularity and even for a popular president both patience and an acumen for deal-making. For all his claims to the contrary, Trump not only lacks the first two. He lacks the third as well."

"Even when legislation is there for the passing, he lacks the focus, interest of skills to get it passed. He is low attention and low energy. Hastily drawn up executive orders, some inconsequential and some unconstitutional, are likely to be the order of the day, only with the Oval Office photo ops with toadies and CEO supplicants thrown in. In other words, it is not a poor man's but a lazy man's authoritarianism. "