美国国家公共电台 NPR Obama Warns Trump Against Relying On Executive Power

DAVID GREENE, HOST: 

President Obama is going through a presidential transition unlike any other. Granted, his transition to power was dramatic during economic crisis. Now, he hands off to a president-elect who pledged to reverse much of his legacy 1.

STEVE INSKEEP, HOST: 

Amid all of this, the president set for an exit interview late last week. He sat in the White House cabinet room by a fireplace draped with Christmas decorations. We talked for nearly an hour about hacking 2 during the election, as we heard on Friday, and much more. Many of the president's accomplishments 3 came through executive actions, to the fury of Republicans who blocked him in Congress. Now, the immense power of the presidency 4 will be turned over to a man who is not known for restraining himself.

Should President-elect Trump 5, once he's inaugurated, use his executive powers in the same way that you have?

BARACK OBAMA: I think that he is entirely 6 within his lawful 7 power to do so. Keep in mind, though, that my strong preference has always been to legislate 8 when I can get legislation done. In my first two years, I wasn't relying on executive powers because I had big majorities in the Congress, and we were able to get bills done, get bills passed.

And even after we lost the majorities in Congress, I bent 9 over backwards 10 consistently to try to find compromise and a legislative 11 solution to some of the big problems that we've got, a classic example being immigration reform, where I held off for years in taking some of the executive actions that I ultimately took in pursuit of a bipartisan solution - one that, by the way, did pass through the Senate on a bipartisan basis with our help. I was very proud of that.

I went out of my way to make sure our help was behind the scenes so that Republicans didn't feel as if it was going to hurt them politically. At the end of the day, John Boehner and the House Republicans couldn't pull the trigger on getting it done. And it was only then, after we had exhausted 12 efforts for bipartisan reform, that we took some additional steps on - on immigration executive actions. So my suggestion to the president-elect is, you know, going through the legislative process is always better, in part because it's harder to undo 13.

INSKEEP: Acting 14 on his own, President Obama gave temporary legal status to people who were brought to the United States illegally as children. And then there's President Obama's Clean Power Plan, which fights climate change and was done through regulation, not written into law. The custodian 15 of these and other initiatives will now be Donald Trump.

OBAMA: That doesn't mean, though, that he is not going to come in and look at the various agencies and see the rules we've passed. And if he wants to reverse some of those rules, that's part of the democratic process. That's, you know, why I tell people to vote - because it turns out elections mean something.

INSKEEP: And this election means even more because the presidency, as has been widely noted 16, is so powerful. It's grown more powerful over generations. You used your power in certain ways and even in ways that you'd suggest in the past might be beyond - beyond your authority.

OBAMA: Well, no, I don't think I've done that.

INSKEEP: If I'm thinking of immigration, for example.

OBAMA: Well, what I - what I said with immigration reform was that I couldn't simply sign a document that legalized 11 million people who had come here illegally and were currently undocumented. What I could do is find categories of people where we could not prioritize as significant risks. But what I always said was we couldn't solve the basic problem of these folks being in the shadows without legislation.

INSKEEP: After he deferred 17 deporting 18 people brought us children, the president was asked if he could protect the parents of citizens, too. He expressed his doubts, then later tried to do it before being blocked in the courts.

The question for me is, has the presidency become too powerful, in your view?

OBAMA: I distinguish between domestic policy and foreign policy.

INSKEEP: On foreign policy, Obama's answer is maybe, yes, the president does have too much power. He spent the entire time that he was in office sending American troops into battle in Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and beyond. It's all been done without much input 19 from Congress.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

OBAMA: Congress starts feeling pretty comfortable with just having the president do all this stuff and not really having to weigh in. So for example, we're still operating in our fight against ISIL without a new congressional authorization 20. It's the authorization that dates back to 9/11. And - and I think that is an area that we have to worry about.

The president and the executive branch are always going to have greater latitude 21 and greater authority when it comes to protecting America because sometimes you just have to respond quickly and not everything that is a danger can be publicized and be subject to open debate, but there have to be some guardrails.

And what we've had to do on things like drones or the NSA or a number of the tools that we use to penetrate 22 terrorist networks, what we've had to do is to build this - the guardrails internally - essentially 23 set up a whole series of processes to guard against government overreach, to reform some practices that I thought, over time, would threaten civil liberties.

You know, there are some critics on the left who would argue we haven't gone far enough on that. I would argue that we've gotten it about right, although I'll - I'm the first one to admit that we didn't get it all right on day one. There were times where, for example, with respect to drones, that I had to kind of stop the system for a second and say, you know what?

We're getting too comfortable with our ability to take kinetic 24 strikes around the world without having enough process to avoid consistently the kinds of civilian 25 casualties that can end up actually hurting us in the war against radicalization.

INSKEEP: In our talk, the outgoing executive says he is also concerned about the president's use of power at home. President Obama's critics said he acted far too much through regulations which are meant to put laws into action. The president says he agrees. He'd rather that a president not do that too much.

OBAMA: I think that what's happened that I do worry about is that Congress has become so dysfunctional that more and more of a burden is placed on the agencies to fill in the gaps. And the gaps get bigger and bigger because they're not constantly refreshed and tweaked. Let's go back to something like the Affordable 26 Care Act.

I could not be prouder of the fact that the uninsured rate has never been lower, that 20 million people have health insurance that we didn't have before. But I said when the bill passed that it wasn't perfect. Over the course of six years of implementing 27 a very complicated piece of legislation that affects one-sixth of the economy that there were going to be things we learned that would allow us to improve it.

And I don't know how many times I've said to Republicans, both publicly and privately 28, in State of the Union speeches and on - in town halls around the country, that if they're willing to engage and work with me, then we can identify ways to tweak and improve this system so that more people have health insurance and it works even better and it's more stable and build on the things that seemed to have worked - for example, the fact that we've actually slowed the growth of health care costs since the bill passed.

And in each - each time I've said this, the basic Republican response has been, no, all we want to do is repeal 29 it, and we'll replace it with something later. And they're still saying that now post-election.

INSKEEP: Which is one irony 30 of this presidential transition. Republicans insisted for years that the president must work through Congress, however hostile or dysfunctional it might be. Now, it is up to Republicans, in charge of Congress and the White House, to work through that same process.

OBAMA: The bottom line is, if you want to right-size executive power relative to the other branches of government, the best way to do that is to have a healthy Congress in which the two parties are debating, disagreeing, but also occasionally working together to pass legislation.

INSKEEP: President Obama just over a month before leaving office