Yet, the other side of the coin is Obama deserves recognition for dismantling the imperial approach to handling the presidency, where his direct predecessor overstepped as much as LBJ and after him Nixon, in their primes.
For example, in the healthcare debate, Obama has been highly and quietly deferential to how the two houses of Congress have been conducting themselves and the debate, paying out rope both to the Blue Dogs and the Republicans and their lobbyist-led obstructionism against a sound and healthy and strong public option as part of the ultimate reform legislation.
He did not step in to loudly decry the Stupak mischief. Instead and despite advance warning it would be pressed, he let it happen. He deferred to it happening, not even strongly using the "bully pulpit" that Theodore Roosevelt long ago recognized attached to holding the White House.
Some might say Obama is being overly deferential, I think that, but at the same time I do have to recognize that he is countering the ways and means that Bush-Cheney used from the White House, their ever vexing tendency to throw their weight around in the course of starting two awfully failed wars, and to otherwise serve special intersts over the public interest, (oil industry interests coming to mind as the clearest example prior to the Paulson-Bernanke engineered Wall Street raiding of the public fisc during Bush-Cheney waning lame duck months).
Leaving that, and shifting to the unallotment context, MN Progressive has a recent post citing an impassioned rather than dispassionate presentation of the usurpation of powers challenge raised against Pawlenty. The underlying item was written by Ryan Winkler, DFL-Golden Valley, "a member of the Minnesota House and a Bemidji High School graduate," and published online by the Bemidji Pioneer, with two paragraphs containing key aspects of the argument:
But instead of continuing constructive budget deliberations with the Legislature, Tim Pawlenty intentionally ignored his responsibility to seek a solution. He just walked away. Lawmakers passed a balanced budget, but the governor signed all the spending bills into law and vetoed the revenue needed to pay for it. He deliberately threw the budget out of balance in order to set the state’s two-year budget single-handedly, without input from the Legislature or the people of Minnesota.
Tim Pawlenty’s unfaithful use of the unallotment statute was nothing more than a politically-motivated power grab. He saw a political opportunity to personally manipulate the state budget on his own terms, and he took it.
We have all heard the term "balance of power" used for federal and State Constitutional principles of having three branches, legislative, executive, and judicial, and distributing the functions of government among each in a way the writers of each Constitution felt proper in order to have an effective set of procedures to govern, but with "checks and balances."
Such general terminology does not say things in a way that whether Pawlenty overreached and usurped legislative rights and powers is an easy decision; which is why the judiciary must wrestle with argument and counterargument. Basically, my bottom line would be that the unallotment statute is a safeguard for unusual situations, an exception to the norm and never intended to be an exception that swallows the rule, (the rule being that there are Constitutional steps that a governor and legislature have to follow, clearly set out in the document). They are the rule - the written set of procedures the State government is to follow in working out balancing of revenue and spending.
The complaint is Pawlenty deliberately ignored the norms and tried to enhance executive powers, on his way out, and for reasons we can only speculate about [future ambitions inconsistent with allowing the legislated balanced budget situation to prevail is my guess, a weakness of character in a leadership position, a trumping of following the rules within the clear text of the Constitution by blind, burning ambition to be nationally recognized and saluted as an aggressive "anti-tax" maven].
Winkler writes about the sense that the unallotment statute was intended to be a seldom-used emergency step and not a regularly utilized political tool to enhance the range of powers allowed a Minnesota governor, stating the concept this way:
Minnesota’s unallotment statute has only been used six times in the state’s history — three of those times by Tim Pawlenty. Until now, unallotment has been used within the confines of the law. It has been used as the statute explicitly requires: when probable state revenue receipts are “less than anticipated.” In other words, according to the law a governor can only utilize the unallotment statute when the state faces a sudden and unanticipated budget deficit.
Last session’s record budget gap was anything but unanticipated. From January until May Gov. Pawlenty and both bodies of the Minnesota Legislature were negotiating budget solutions to fill a $6.4 billion budget shortfall — a deficit explicitly predicted by the 2009 February budget forecast. For months the deficit was there when the governor went to bed at night, and it was there when he woke up in the morning.
From that presentation of his view of background to the latest Pawlenty use of the unallotment statute, (characterized clearly in a way implying Pawlenty was a tricky politician doing what he knows best, trickery), Winkler moved to the earlier quoted two key paragraphs of his argument.
It seems to boil down to Pawlenty saying the statute was the legislature giving the governor the unallotment powers, and he, as governor, properly used them.
The counter argument is that he misused the powers, and that they were never intended, nor could they be Constitutionally intended to subvert procedures clearly mandated within the Constitution itself - that the Constitution cannot be amended indirectly and backhandedly by statute and by a handful of instances of prior allowed practices; but only by the express manner of direct amendment the document itself specifies.
The judiciary will provide an answer, and the time frame is as uncertain as what the answer will be - but my guess is the answer will be Pawlenty exceeded his authority when statute and Constitution are reasonably read together in a consistent way; and that the legislature and new Governor need to correct the mess left on the way out by Governor Pawlenty - and many, myself included, consider it an unnecessary mess that happened only because the man was ambitious and positioning himself for a calculated run at the presidency as a "tax-opponent governor," and that he put personal ambitions of that kind ahead of all else, i.e., being an unsound governor by being an anti-tax showman.
On time frame, I expect it will derail the man's very ambitions that deterred him from signing both the spending and revenue bills together for a balanced budget, and instead motivated him to play games impacting real people, such as the six plaintiffs in the litigation. By that, I mean the judicial challenge will continue unresolved well into next year, and not be resolved earlier where the short attention span of the public and MSM "news" outlets otherwise might create distance in time, and a consequent disinterest around election day.
NOTE: An earlier Crabgrass post relating to the unallotment dispute is this link. It is more informational for readers to gain an informed opinion, while this post gets more into the opinions held and expressed by a DFL legislative member, and by me, as largely in agreement with Rep. Winkler's view.