Kamala Harris is preparing to govern by executive order

Sen. Kamala Harris is leading the pack of 2020 Democratic presidential candidates when it comes to outlining executive action she would take if she were elected and her proposals were thwarted by Congress.

For all the focus that there has been on big ticket items Democrats are proposing, the reality is that even in the best case scenario, the next Democratic president will be taking office with a razor-thin Senate majority, and passing anything major would require nuking the filibuster and winning the votes of Democrats representing traditionally red states.

So, the sweeping proposals that have been the focus of so much attention — free college, student loan cancellation, free healthcare, free day care, guaranteed government jobs, the Green New Deal — none of them have a realistic path to legislative passage.

President Barack Obama famously adopted the “pen and phone” strategy to implement key priorities from healthcare to immigration when he couldn’t get what he wanted out of Congress. President Trump has continued that tradition, most prominently, with his moves on immigration and efforts to invoke emergency powers to build his border wall.

In a polarized environment in which the Senate is closely divided and the parties have no interest in cutting deals on major issues with one another, the next president will primarily be governing by executive action. So if you want to get a better sense of what a president would be like, focus on what they’re promising to do without Congress. On that front, Harris is promising to be the most aggressive.

“Immediately on January 20th of 2021, I will, first of all — we cannot forget our DACA recipients, and so I’m going to start there,” Harris said in the first Democratic debate, outlining her immigration strategy. “I will immediately, by executive action, reinstate DACA status and DACA protection to those young people.

She continued, “I will further extend protection for deferral of deportation for their parents and for veterans, who we have so many who are undocumented and have served our country and fought for our democracy.”

But that was neither the first or last time Harris vowed to govern unilaterally.

“Upon being elected, I will give the United States Congress 100 days to get their act together and have the courage to pass reasonable gun safety laws,” she said in an April CNN town hall. “And if they fail to do it, then I will take executive action.”

She continued, “And specifically what I will do is put in place a requirement that for anyone who sells more than five guns a year, they are required to do background checks when they sell those guns. I will require that for any gun dealer that breaks the law, the ATF take their license. And by the way, ATF, alcohol, tobacco and firearms, well, the ATF has been doing a lot of the ‘A’ and the ‘T,’ but not much of the ‘F.’ And we need to fix that.”

And now, she’s claiming she’d take action to reduce drug prices. The Huffington Post reported that if Congress doesn’t adopt her policies, Harris “promises that as president, she could take a host of unilateral actions though the executive branch, including by starting investigations of companies involved in price gouging that could lead to the importation of cheaper foreign drugs and criminal charges against offending companies. ”

A combination of the difficulty in getting major legislation through Congress, the refusal of members of Congress to assert their power as a co-equal branch of government over the decades, and the increasing frustration of each party’s base in seeing their agenda thwarted despite winning elections are all increasing the use of executive actions.

There is also a natural escalation. When one party does an end-around Congress to impose its policies, the base of the other party argues that it would be unilateral disarmament to refrain from taking such actions when in power. There is a danger of becoming so reliant on executive actions that the United States moves away from a constitutional republic of checks and balances and closer toward autocracy. But partisan voters are much more concerned about actual outcomes than being consistent about the process used to achieve outcomes.

Given that once a president is in power and takes executive actions voters have less power to stop it, Americans should re-calibrate how they follow elections to consider what candidates would do if they couldn’t get things through Congress.

It says something that Harris, who rose to power as an zealous prosecutor, would be arguing in favor of such an aggressive approach to unilateral actions.