Editor’s Note: For an alternative viewpoint, please see: Counterpoint: Death by 100 Failing Days
With the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of President Trump, it’s easy to miss all that has already been accomplished by this administration. This first 100 days has been dedicated to quietly but diligently rolling back the tremendous regulatory burdens that was heaped on businesses during the Obama administration, and restoring the rule of law.
These accomplishments will soon begin paying dividends for the American people with more and better job opportunities and a growing economy.
Just as the previous administration used executive orders to empower the administrative bureaucracies to create policy and heavily regulate the economy, President Trump is using the presidential pen to remove this red tape. Trump’s Energy Independence Executive Order was the first step in reversing President Obama’s Clean Power Plan. That Obama-era executive order sought drastically to limit carbon-emissions from power plants, which it claimed was a necessary measure for combatting global warming.
Yet while these regulations would have imposed crushing costs of America’s economy, they would have done very little to actual affect global warming’s trajectory. Analysts using the EPA’s own climate-model emulator found that Clean Power Plan rules would result in minuscule change of less than a two-hundredths of a degree Celsius change by 2100.
That paltry result would come at a cost of millions of lost jobs (the National Black Chamber of Commerce estimated that blacks and Hispanics alone would suffer 19 million lost jobs by 2035 as a result of the Clean Power Plan), nearly $500 billion in compliance costs for businesses, and double-digit electricity rate increases for families in most states. Getting rid of just this one set of EPA rules is a tremendous boon to the economy and will mean more jobs for American workers.
Yet that’s just one way that Trump has sought to help get Americans back to work. He greenlighted permits for the Keystone and Dakota Access pipelines — important energy projects with the potential to create thousands of good jobs. Additional executive orders will help roll back other unnecessary, job-destroying regulations and — even more important — encourage agencies to embrace a cost-benefit-analysis approach to regulating moving forward.
Trump appointed the 49-year-old Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court to replace the late Antonin Scalia, restoring the Supreme Court’s previous balance and ensuring that the court will look to the letter of laws, rather than allow judges to make policy from the bench. This is incredibly important to the future of our country. For too long, the judicial branch has been taking on the role of policymaking, essentially creating rather than just enforcing the law as our founders intended.
People of all political stripes should applaud a return to our traditional checks and balances, which would mean that the people’s elected representatives, rather than a handful of judges, oversee lawmaking.
The Trump administration has made significant progress in its first 100 days to encourage all levels of government — from local city officials to our national border guards — to enforce existing immigration laws. That alone has helped slow the tide of illegal immigration into our country and is an important foundation for protecting our national security and creating a commonsense immigration system in the future.
The president, at long last, is making clear to the world that the United States is a country that keeps its word. Red lines drawn must be enforced. That’s what the president did in Syria, and is promising to do in North Korea. Demonstrating this steadfastness and a willingness to act is an important foundation to curtailing overseas aggression and protecting vital national security interests of America and our allies.
Much more work needs to be done: The president must move forward on repealing the Affordable Care Act, to give Americans better and more affordable health care options. He must continue to push for comprehensive tax reform that will make American companies competitive and restore the American Dream for our citizens who have for too long felt as though they are treading water.
