When a new president is elected, millions of voters begin to hope that the work of the previous administration will be undone and all of the policies and promises on which their candidate campaigned will come to fruition. As history tells us, that’s only partially true. The phone and the pen, about which former President Obama ominously warned his opponents, have their limits. The reviled overtime rule was started with an executive order, but it was the months of work conducted afterwards by the Department of Labor that led to its writing as a binding rule, only to be challenged in the courts.
The regulatory process is long, detailed and many times a runaway locomotive that appears unstoppable. While one would think that the president of the United States would have the authority to stop them in their tracks, the reality is they often do not, as is the case with many of the so-called midnight regulations that were rushed through last December and January. Something else to bear in mind, the idea that President Trump and his agencies simply don’t have to enforce the law, that much is true, but never forget the public’s ability to fight back.