When my mentor teacher and I opened the floor on Wednesday for people to share their thoughts and questions about the election and the president elect, one question that came up in every class was: What can the president do? Can he really build a wall? What can he do without the approval of Congress?
I was at somewhat a loss of what to say. I don't know how far executive orders can go. I also don't know how much a Republican-controlled House and Senate will provide a significant "check" to presidential power.
I'd been thinking about this questions a good deal when I listened to this episode of This American Life, first broadcast in 2013, about a man, Kirk Johnson, who unwittingly found himself enmeshed in an effort to help Iraqis who has worked with the US in Iraq during the war, and who were now seeking an accelerated path to US citizenship to escape the threat that continuing to live amongst the US's enemies in Iraq posed.
Johnson was at the same time successful and unsuccessful. He worked with senators, including Ted Kennedy, to pass a law that provided 25,000 immigrant slots to people employed by the US in Iraq. Bush administration officials made it almost impossible for these people to actually come to the US. Very few cases were processed, and Johnson's book details the frustrations of one man, alias Omar, trying to work with the bureaucracy that should have granted him asylum.
The episode relates how it would have taken President Bush or Obama to issue an executive order to air-lift Iraqis to a secure military base outside the US where they could be screened. This is called the "Guam Option". It had been done before. Johnson's point is, the president has to act first, calling on the military to do the heavy lifting: getting the Iraqis out of Iraq. Then the bureaucracies can do their screening work.
When the episode was published, it was just after the Boston Marathon bombings, and Johnson was concerned that efforts on a new Visa piece of legislation would be stymied by the anti-muslim backlash that promised to follow the bombings.
This is one thing the president can do: make decisions that help us behave like neighbors of good integrity on the international stage. Britain, Australia, Denmark, he says, have all done the responsible thing and made sure that their allies from war time are safe outside the countries where they risked their lives to help the US forces.
I cannot imagine our president elect making a decision to make immigration easier for any Muslim, regardless of whether he or she helped the US overseas. This is a small answer to the question of what the president can do, but it feels substantial in that it represents an area of governance that I've certainly never thought about. There must be hundreds of such areas.
I was at somewhat a loss of what to say. I don't know how far executive orders can go. I also don't know how much a Republican-controlled House and Senate will provide a significant "check" to presidential power.
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| Kirk Johnson |
Johnson was at the same time successful and unsuccessful. He worked with senators, including Ted Kennedy, to pass a law that provided 25,000 immigrant slots to people employed by the US in Iraq. Bush administration officials made it almost impossible for these people to actually come to the US. Very few cases were processed, and Johnson's book details the frustrations of one man, alias Omar, trying to work with the bureaucracy that should have granted him asylum.
The episode relates how it would have taken President Bush or Obama to issue an executive order to air-lift Iraqis to a secure military base outside the US where they could be screened. This is called the "Guam Option". It had been done before. Johnson's point is, the president has to act first, calling on the military to do the heavy lifting: getting the Iraqis out of Iraq. Then the bureaucracies can do their screening work.
When the episode was published, it was just after the Boston Marathon bombings, and Johnson was concerned that efforts on a new Visa piece of legislation would be stymied by the anti-muslim backlash that promised to follow the bombings.
This is one thing the president can do: make decisions that help us behave like neighbors of good integrity on the international stage. Britain, Australia, Denmark, he says, have all done the responsible thing and made sure that their allies from war time are safe outside the countries where they risked their lives to help the US forces.
I cannot imagine our president elect making a decision to make immigration easier for any Muslim, regardless of whether he or she helped the US overseas. This is a small answer to the question of what the president can do, but it feels substantial in that it represents an area of governance that I've certainly never thought about. There must be hundreds of such areas.
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