Joe Biden trotted out this week to declare that he has cancer will sign a bunch of executive orders on climate change. Is it because he has the power to do so? No, but because Congress won’t. And political analyst Charles C.W. Cooke argues effectively that such a power grab is unacceptable.

President Biden is once again gearing up to utter a series of words that ought to inspire Americans to search in exasperation for their pitchforks: “If Congress won’t do it, I will.”

If it can raise itself from the reverie that our imperial presidency has imposed upon it, the public’s emphatic response to the president’s climate plan must be, “No, you damn well will not.” Article I of the U.S. Constitution vests “All legislative Powers” in Congress, not in the White House, and, in exercising those powers, Congress’s judgment is not advisory, but binding. If, as is often the case, Congress declines to act in a given realm, the result is not a transfer of authority, it is inertia. There is no such thing as a Too Important Clause in our highest law, nor is there any provision that accords lawmaking powers to the executive branch in such cases as its friends consider the legislature to be irresponsible. There are, indeed, a handful of statutes on the books that grant the executive some emergency powers, but those are not enabling acts, and, funnily enough, they require the existence of an emergency before they can be applied. No emergency exists in this case. That the Democratic Party has been unable to get its agenda past its own senators is presumably frustrating for it, but it does not count as a crisis under any plausibly interpretation of that term.

It is Senator Sheldon Whitehouse who’s responsible for declaring, “It’s time for executive Beast Mode.” Numerous other legislators are more than happy to transfer legislative power to the executive in order to get what they want.

Alarmingly, even those who can intuit the shortcomings of the Whitehouse–Sanders–Merkley approach seem curiously unable to recognize why. “While I strongly support additional executive action by President Biden,” Senator Ron Wyden has conceded, “we know a flood of Republican lawsuits will follow. Legislation continues to be the best option here.” Does it? Why, though? That “flood of Republican lawsuits” Wyden anticipates. What does he imagine that they will say? Will they be full of unintelligible screams, or will they argue, perhaps, that the Constitution does not accord the executive branch the power to do whatever it wants every time that it believes that the issue is really important? A few weeks ago, after the Supreme Court had reminded Congress that it — and not the president — is charged with making law, Representative Rashida Tlaib described the judiciary as “fascist.” Helpfully, Tlaib provided a definition of this term. “Fascism,” she proposed, is a system in which “the federal government will be restricted from regulating anything of significance in the absence of a clear congressional directive to do so.” That, as the kids like to say these days, is “telling on yourself.”

Cooke concludes:

To respond to the Supreme Court’s refusal to allow the executive branch to exceed its authority with a call for the executive branch to exceed its authority would be the very definition of madness. Under the American system of government, there is only one appropriate response to the discovery that one lacks the votes to advance one’s preferences, and that response is not to establish some tin-pot, “unchained,” “Beast Mode” dictatorship. It is to lose.

National Review subscribers can read the whole thing here.