Last week, the Trump administration abruptly announced that it would suspend controversial changes to the U.S. Postal Service until after the election. Postmaster General Louis DeJoy, a major Trump donor handpicked by the administration, vowed to restore overtime pay for postal workers and stop removing sorting machines and taking other cost-cutting measures.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) credited the public for spurring the sudden reversal: “They felt the heat.” It probably also helped that some Republican lawmakers objected to the cuts, especially in rural areas.
This isn’t the first public backlash to force the Trump administration — or previous presidents — to backtrack. Public opinion — more than constitutional checks and balances — provides the strongest brake against presidents attempting to act without congressional support.
It can be tough to check presidents when they act unilaterally
The Constitution gave each branch of the federal government the power to check other branches’ excesses. But the formal checks on a president willing to move unilaterally are weak.
Indeed, presidents have both strong incentives and the necessary tools to make major policy changes unilaterally, without seeking congressional support. Critics have decried each of the last three presidents as “imperial” for their willingness to go it alone.
Consider President Trump’s border wall. Congress refused to appropriate funds for it, and the federal government shut down over the impasse. The president caved and signed a spending deal without wall funding. Then he immediately declared a national emergency to reprogram funds to build the wall anyway. Congress passed legislation to rescind the emergency declaration, but Trump vetoed it and his order stood.
Federal courts can also strike down unilateral actions. The Trump administration has suffered an unprecedented string of legal defeats to administrative actions on procedural grounds. But courts rarely reverse presidential directives like executive orders outright.
The House rebuked Trump over the post office. Here are 3 takeaways.
Presidents rarely take major unilateral actions
Weak institutional checks, combined with Congress’s difficulties legislating in an intensely polarized era, should tempt presidents to move their policy agendas forward unilaterally. But this is not what we find empirically.
In our new book, “The Myth of the Imperial Presidency,” we explored several measures of significant executive action over time. Surprisingly, presidents don’t act unilaterally very often to enact meaningful policy change. For example, presidents can use executive orders — pronouncements that direct government officials to take certain actions — but from 1981 to 2018 presidents averaged just 10 of these per year that received even a single mention in the New York Times. Looking more broadly at any executive action mentioned in the Times from 1977 to 2018, presidents issued on average just over a dozen. Some of these actions, like the memorandum that created the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, brought about meaningful change. But many others, such as Trump’s creation of the Electoral Fraud Commission, did not.
History tells us there are four key threats to democracy. The U.S. is facing all four.
Public backlash restrains presidents
Public opinion — not formal institutional checks or allegiance to democratic norms — keeps presidents in check.
Presidents think and act strategically. If their public support erodes, that’s politically costly; it reduces their political capital and threatens their ability to wring concessions from Congress on other parts of their agenda. Less popular presidents face a tougher time getting reelected and can damage the rest of their party’s fortunes when it’s time to vote.
We can clearly see the power of public opinion in some recent cases, as with the administration’s short-lived policies on the post office and separating immigrant families at the border. The public revolted against these controversial moves, and the administration backed down. In other cases, the White House drafted executive orders but never issued them because they proved broadly unpopular — as with President Bill Clinton’s 1993 draft order to allow homosexuals to serve openly in the military or Trump’s 2017 draft order to loosen restrictions on the CIA’s use of torture.
Trump’s latest executive orders have three big problems.
Threat of backlash also limits unilateral action
Public opinion can also work indirectly. Presidents who anticipate a backlash often opt against executive action.
When we analyze trends in major executive actions over time, we find that presidents are more reluctant to act unilaterally when they are low in the polls. Unpopular presidents anticipate greater and more costly popular pushback to bold unilateral action.
What’s more, most unilateral presidential actions — at least before Trump — were popular. To be sure, sometimes presidents are willing to act unilaterally despite almost certain popular backlash, as when President George W. Bush pursued a 2007 surge in troops in the Iraq War, despite staunch congressional and public opposition. But unpopular actions like these are historically rare. Indeed, in a systematic analysis of every executive action taken by Presidents Bush and Obama for which we could find public polling data, most enjoyed significant public support. Bush averaged 58 percent support for his unilateral actions, and Obama 55 percent.
Trump’s approach is different
We find that Trump acts unilaterally slightly more often than his predecessors. But the differences are modest. They likely come from how often Trump reversed Obama-era initiatives early on and from the news media’s proclivity for covering Trump’s every move. Many don’t amount to much substantively, like the coronavirus “eviction moratorium” that did not actually stop evictions.
Unlike most presidents, Trump’s unilateral actions generally pursue policies strongly supported by his electoral base but opposed by the general public.
You can see that in the figure below, which shows average net approval — subtracting the percentage who disapprove from the percentage who approve — for all of Trump’s executive actions for which we could identify public polling data from the Roper Center archive. Only one, Trump’s third travel ban, enjoyed more public support than opposition.
If future presidents also feel politically unencumbered to act unilaterally as long as they are supported by a small, core base, then the strongest remaining check on presidential imperialism may become obsolete, leaving few informal limits on presidents’ considerable executive power.
Don’t miss any of TMC’s smart analysis! Sign up here for our newsletter.
Dino Christenson is associate professor of political science and a fellow of the Hariri Institute at Boston University.
Douglas Kriner is Clinton Rossiter Professor in American Institutions and faculty director of the Institute of Politics and Global Affairs at Cornell University.
They are co-authors of “The Myth of the Imperial Presidency” (University of Chicago Press, July 2020).