Presidents, Congress, and the Politics of Unilateral Action

Abstract The rules, structures, practices, and political dynamics of Congress inform more than just how legislators go about their work. These factors also weigh upon presidents when they decide whether to advance a policy agenda through legislative or administrative channels. Impediments to lawmaking, a rich body of scholarship demonstrates, routinely encourage presidents to bypass Congress and instead issue executive orders, proclamations, memoranda, and other unilateral directives. This chapter inventories the many unilateral actions taken by Donald Trump in the face of congressional disinterest, dysfunction, and even opposition. Coupled with a brief case study of Barack Obama’s exercise of unilateral powers in education policy, this history has important implications for our understandings of presidential-congressional dynamics, the shifting locus of policy decision-making in the federal government, and the changing balance of power between the first two branches of government.