TPM - great take by Josh Marshall - "Thinking About Trump's 100 Day Fail"

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/thinking-about-trumps-100-day-fail

By JOSH MARSHALL Published APRIL 29, 2017 11:32 AM

So here we are at 100 Days, an arbitrary but nevertheless significant milestone in a presidency. I wanted to step back and size up its meaning, both to give ourselves some perspective but also for those from other countries who are less familiar with the US federal system.

From a distance, it looks like the US federal system can up and pass laws pretty much whenever. In practice, particularly when it comes to laws tied to spending and taxation, there is an overlapping series of frameworks, scheduled vacations and legislative calendars, fixed election dates and more that constrain action to a great degree. The schedule of actions tied to writing federal budgets is a big one – though the deadlines have been missed with greater and greater frequency in recent years. Then there’s the matter of fixed election dates. In the US we tend to take this for granted. But it’s not the norm in major constitutional democracies. The fixed schedule matters a lot.

Mix in the American system’s separation of executive and legislative powers and it’s fairly complicated and time-consuming to get things done. So while the 100 Day metric is arbitrary (a concept that dates back to FDR), the first months of a presidency provide a window of opportunity in which a President has a relative free hand. The budget schedule is relatively far off in the distance. Elections are as far away as they can be in the US system. Scheduled vacations are in the distance.

Perhaps most importantly the President has an amorphous but real legitimacy to act. He was elected. He should get to put his program in effect. This is obviously a very fuzzy notion. Nothing mandates that it be the case. But in historical terms it demonstrably is the case.

snip - much more to read at the link above