[Pearls Before Swine]

If Obama really wanted to protect his signature foreign policy achievement, he should have had the Senate properly ratify it as a treaty so Trump couldn’t pull out of it like he just did.

He would have, if he could have. There were too many secret side-deals. He never could have gotten the two-thirds vote necessary out of the Senate.

[Political Junkie Too]

That's the point -- he couldn't.

Obama had previously rationalized taking unilateral executive action by calling saying that if Congress failed to act, he would act. Pundits pointed out that Congress "failing" to act is itself an act; it is essentially a pocket veto of the Congressional kind, but it is not permission for the President to thumb his nose at them and act anyway.

Obama showed the same tendency when he declared that Congress's recess was not a "real" recess when he recess-appointed members to the National Labor Relations Board. SCOTUS had to rule that Congress, and not the President, gets to declare what is and is not a recess, and they invalidated Obama's appointments.

-PJ

-PJ