The Obama Administrative Presidency: Some Late-Term Patterns

President Obama's iteration of the administrative presidency, as his term ended, used both extant tools and stressed new ones. This essay centers on three themes: (1) the array of managerial directives used, as a caution against simply counting executive orders to measure Obama's administrative efforts; (2) the central role of statutory interpretation to find power in extant law to justify presidential preferences in areas such as health care, environmental protection, and immigration, with mixed results in the courtroom and thus on the ground; and (3) the aggressive-and far less challenged-use of that same tool in foreign policy and the war powers. In each area the Obama administrative presidency will bequeath useful precedent to his successors.