I said the exact same thing: progressives love giving this kind of imperial power to Obama, but it will come back and bite us in the butt when Trump exercises the same powers.
But they were against it before they were for it (before they were against it, again).
“Trump already looks like a thought experiment you’d make up to scare liberals straight about the concentration of executive power,” says the Cato Institute’s Gene Healy, who has a cover story in the current issue of Reason arguing that Obama’s “most lasting legacy” will be to “leave to his successor a presidency even more powerful and dangerous than the one he inherited from Bush.”
In our latest podcast, Healy chats with Editor in Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward about the most likely long-term impact of a president once touted as our first civil libertarian in the White House—and it won’t be what “your neighbor who put a ‘Hope’ sticker on his Prius” had in mind.