Embed
Share
USA TODAY reporter Gregory Korte asks White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest why he thinks signing ceremonies have been rare under President Obama. USA TODAY NETWORK
Rep. Carolyn Maloney, D-N.Y., holds up a pen used by President Obama to sign the Credit Card Accountability, Responsibility, and Disclosure Act in the Rose Garden at the White House on May 22, 2009. (Photo: Mark Wilson, Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — President Obama will invite members of Congress to the White House on Tuesday to laud the passage of the 21st Century Cures Act. Then, in a ritual that goes back to President Harry Truman, he'll likely use dozens of pens to sign the bill, handing them out as souvenirs.
The gathering is almost certainly the last bill-signing ceremony in a presidency in which such events have been increasingly rare — especially during the past six years, as divided and Republican Congresses have sent him fewer bills to sign.
It's just one outward symbol of an Obama legislative legacy that includes some early signature accomplishments as well as gridlock.
USA TODAY
Obama signs $6.3 billion law for cancer research, drug treadment
Obama has had 60 bill-signing ceremonies during his presidency, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from the American Presidency Project. That's significantly fewer than fellow two-term presidents George W. Bush (95) and Bill Clinton (91). President Ronald Reagan — whose party never controlled Congress in eight years — signed 61.
"It's an indication that there's been very little passed by Congress under Republican leadership that's worthy of a signing ceremony," White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Monday, "We're not going to have a signing ceremony for a post office naming."
Christopher Kelley, a political scientist at Miami University of Ohio, agreed.
Kelly has studied how presidents use written signing statements to define and interpret the laws they’re signing — even to indicate what parts of the new law they won’t enforce. By contrast, he said, the public ceremonies are mostly rhetorical: They serve to help claim credit for legislative accomplishments, praise members of Congress who worked on the bill, or admonish Congress for not doing more.
A year ago, as Obama signed the Every Student Succeeds Act, he called the ceremony "a Christmas miracle."
"A bipartisan bill signing right here," he said. "We should do this more often. I love it when we’re signing bipartisan bills."
Posted!
A link has been posted to your Facebook feed.
Like this topic? You may also like these photo galleries:
-
1 of 34 -
2 of 34 -
3 of 34 -
4 of 34 -
5 of 34 -
6 of 34 -
7 of 34 -
8 of 34 -
9 of 34 -
10 of 34 -
11 of 34 -
12 of 34 -
13 of 34 -
14 of 34 -
15 of 34 -
16 of 34 -
17 of 34 -
18 of 34 -
19 of 34 -
20 of 34 -
21 of 34 -
22 of 34 -
23 of 34 -
24 of 34 -
25 of 34 -
26 of 34 -
27 of 34 -
28 of 34 -
29 of 34 -
30 of 34 -
31 of 34 -
32 of 34 -
33 of 34 -
34 of 34
Congressional leaders say they've sent Obama plenty of bipartisan bills worth celebrating, including on infrastructure, opioid abuse and tax relief. "It’s a joke to say that there haven’t been many opportunities for signing ceremonies — but it would contradict all their 'obstruction' claims if they did signing ceremonies on all of these," said Don Stewart, a spokesman for Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
Half of Obama's signing ceremonies were in the first two years of his presidency, when Democrats had full control of Congress. In those years, Obama had a streak of landmark legislative victories that would be the envy of any president: The American Reinvestment and Recovery Act (better known as the stimulus bill), the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act.
"When you consider the kind of legislative progress that we were able to make when Democrats were in charge of the Congress, the president’s résumé looks quite strong," Earnest said. "Even when viewed over the span of eight years, that was a remarkably productive two-year period."
But then Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010, largely as a result of a backlash against many of those laws. And with President-elect Donald Trump ready to move into the Oval Office — and with Republican majorities in both the House and Senate — even some of Obama's early accomplishments appear to be in jeopardy.
USA TODAY
An 'Obama era' crashes as Donald Trump takes White House
"I think the legacy is in trouble," said Barry Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who has studied the life and death of government programs. The coalition that passed those — especially the Affordable Care Act and and the Dodd-Frank financial regulations — was a combination of President Obama and a Democratic Congress. And even then it was difficult. That puts those two items from the first two years on the chopping block."
The bills since then have been fewer and less sweeping — and often more ephemeral, Burden said. "A lot of the big accomplishments were these big crisis budget resolutions that he fell into," he said. Obama had signing ceremonies on bills that simply kept the government open for another year.
In 2011, Obama held just two signing ceremonies — the fewest since 1985. And in one of them, he outlined a series of executive actions he was taking on job creation, the beginning of a "pen and phone" strategy to go around Congress wherever possible through executive orders and presidential memoranda.
Since then, Congress has sent Obama fewer and fewer bills — and the 114th Congress, which adjourned last week, has reached a new historic low.
"This Congress, the Senate has passed nearly 300 bills and nearly 200 of those are now law," McConnell told the Senate as it adjourned Friday. "But what really matters isn’t the number of bills passed, it’s what we can achieve on behalf of the American people. And by that standard, I’m incredibly proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish for our country."
In a series of pre-election fundraisers, Obama often remarked that Republicans in Congress couldn't even get their act together enough to send him bills to veto. He's vetoed 12 bills, only one of which was overridden.
"I think it’s an indication of just how bankrupt the Republican governing agenda has been. There isn’t one," Earnest said. "And I think the fact that there have not been many signing ceremonies and not been many vetoes is as clear an indication as any."
But Earnest said Obama has also had some unsung legislative victories, like the 2012 tax agreement that forced Congress to compromise and allow part of the 2001 Bush-era tax cuts to expire.
"President Obama did succeed in doing something that Republicans had blocked for almost 20 years, and that’s getting them to raise income taxes," he said. "And that was the fulfillment of a promise that President Obama had made on the campaign trail, and that has had a positive impact on our deficit. It’s had a positive impact on the notion of a fairness in our tax code. And it’s had positive benefits for our economy."
Obama didn't have a signing ceremony for that bill. Instead, he spoke to reporters in the briefing room on New Year's Day, the night the bill was passed.
USA TODAY
Obama uses 'memos' in place of congressional action
The signing ceremonies counted by USA TODAY can range from a simple Oval Office statement in front of reporters and photographers to large public events with the public invited. And to send an even bigger message, the president can even take his bill-signing pens on the road: He signed the stimulus bill in Denver, an overhaul of the Veterans Administration at Fort Belvoir, Va., and a public service bill at a Washington, D.C., charter school.
When he signed an annual spending bill in 2014, he did it at the New Executive Office Building, in an attempt to recognize staffers at the Office of Management and Budget. "This is not usually where I do bill signings. But in addition to the opportunity to take a walk — and whenever I get a chance to take a walk, I seize it — we wanted to make sure that we did this bill signing here because it represents the extraordinary work of so many of you."
"And I'm going to use all these pens," he said.
Không có nhận xét nào:
Đăng nhận xét