The good news, if you want to look at it that way, is that the left has suddenly decided there are limits on the executive authority of the president. Not the silly ones in the constitution, mind you. They have no use for those and never did, which is why they had no problem with any abuse of power by the lightbringer Obama.
The limits on Trump's power are not based on constitutional limits on government, but rather on their ability to find left-wing judges who will come up with some pretext to strike down his actions. We've already seen this with immigration, and now that Trump is ready to formalize the reversal of Obama's global warming agenda, the left is going to try the same thing:
U.S. President Donald Trump will sign an executive order on Tuesday to undo a slew of Obama-era climate change regulations, a move meant to bolster domestic energy production but which environmentalists have vowed to challenge in court.
The decree, dubbed the "Energy Independence" order, will seek to undo former President Barack Obama's Clean Power Plan requiring states to slash carbon emissions from power plants - a critical element in helping the United States meet its commitments to a global climate change accord agreed by nearly 200 countries in Paris in December 2015.
It will also rescind a ban on coal leasing on federal lands, reverse rules to curb methane emissions from oil and gas production, and reduce the weight of climate change in federal agencies' assessments of new regulations.
"We're going to go in a different direction," a senior White House official told reporters ahead of Tuesday's order. "The previous administration devalued workers with their policies. We can protect the environment while providing people with work."
Trump will sign the order at the EPA with the agency's Administrator Scott Pruitt, Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke and Energy Secretary Rick Perry on Tuesday afternoon.
The wide-ranging order is the boldest yet in Trump’s broader push to cut environmental regulation to revive the oil and gas drilling and coal mining industries, a promise he made repeatedly during his campaign for the presidency.
I can't wait to hear how greens argue that the president lacks the authority to not ban coal leasing. Maybe they'll do what they did with the immigration order - skipping serious legal arguments altogether and simply insisting that Trump has sinister motives entirely unrelated to the content of the order itself.
Even though it's not in the order, he really wants to spill oil into every waterway in America!
What the hell kind of legal argument is that, you might ask? No legal argument at all, but it might be good enough for Judge Derrick Watson and Judge Theodore Chuang. Might as well give it a shot, huh?
On a substantive level, it's very significant that Trump is prepared to walk away from emission limits on power plants, since that was a crucial element of any U.S. effort to comply with international climate accords - even though our participation in such accords has never been ratified by the Senate as required by the Constitution.
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But we covered this, right? The Constitution is not the operative authority here. It's whatever you can convince a left-wing judge to do once you've done your judge-shopping. The left doesn't care about the law. It only cares about winning.
As much as anything else, Trump's order reveals just how heavily Obama brought the administrative state to bear on American business and industry - and how much it made the kooky religion of global warming the center of everything the federal government did in its energy policy and its disposition toward the productive sector of the economy.
Merely ceasing to behave in this manner should be a boon to business and industry, particularly the energy sector.
Wait. Isn't there something in the Constitution that says no policy can ever benefit oil companies? Well if there's not, there should be! Find a left-wing judge who will rule as if such a provision exists, because the limits on executive power suddenly matter again.
