The new round of "Green Lantern" arguments begins

One of the tropes that was particularly prominent during the Obama Administration was something called "the Green Lantern theory of the Presidency". This was a phrase used mainly as mockery of calls by progressives for Obama to more openly confront bad Republican ideas or to highlight real problems and focus attention on them. (For anyone wondering, Green Lantern is a comic-book superhero who has been around since 1940.)

Politics is politics. And the "Green Lantern" trope was part of an entirely normal and necessary part of politics. Partisans have different priorities, and elected officials have to prioritize which issues are more urgent than others and they have to make decisions on how hard to fight over them. In any negotiation, the participants have to "know when to hold 'em" and "know when to fold 'em," to recall Kenny Rogers' famous song.

With the Biden-Harris Administration coming into office in January, the Democratic version of partisan infighting over positions and priorities they want the President to take is now back on stage. Since the "Green Lantern" trope was used by establishment Democrats against progressives during the Obama-Biden Administration and the Republicans didn't pick it up during the Trump-Pence government, it's worth recalling for a moment how it works.

Greg Sargent hauled out the GL trope during the Obama years in Why the Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power persists Washington Post 04/30/2013.

At today’s press conference, President Obama spent a fair amount of time pushing back on what some of us are calling the “Green Lantern Theory of Presidential Power.” This theory — which seems to hold broad sway over many in the press — holds that presidents should be able to bend Congress to their will, and any failure to do so proves their weakness and perhaps even their irrelevance.

What accounts for the persistence of this theory? The answer, I think, lies in the tendency of reporters and analysts who are trying to remain a neutral, nonpartisan posture to feel comfortable making process judgments, but not ideological ones.

Now, Greg Sargent was primarily focusing on a lazy mainstream press posture of focusing on process rather than policy, which actually is a chronic shortcoming of the corporate press. I would say he was making a solid point in that column:

This isn’t to absolve Obama of all responsibility to move Congress. Surely presidents have the power to set the agenda and get the public to think more about an issue. But as many others have explained at great length — see Jonathan Bernstein and Kevin Drum on this — the president’s influence over Congress is currently quite limited, historically speaking, for a host of reasons.

But progressives also legitimately criticized Obama for falling back on empty invocations of bipartisan cooperation and not using his own position and popularity to rally public pressure not only to put pressure on Republicans over specific legislation but to encourage public awareness of serious problems.

One instance where I think Obama failed in both ways was on the Citizens United decision in January 2010, one year into Obama's eight-year Presidency. Obama's initial rhetorical response was excellent, and very memorable. "This ruling strikes at our democracy itself," he declared. "I can’t think of anything more devastating to the public interest." (Sheryl Gay Stolberg, Obama Turns Up Heat Over Ruling on Campaign Spending New York Times 11/23/2010) In his State of the Union address that month, he said, "With all due deference to separation of powers, last week the Supreme Court reversed a century of law that I believe will open the floodgates for special interests –- including foreign corporations –- to spend without limit in our elections." (Remarks by the President in State of the Union Address Obama White House Archives 01/27/2020)

But after a failed attempt at a legislative fix that year when Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate, , the issue was essentially put on the standard list of issues using in Democratic Party fundraising appeals but de facto accepted as the way things work and should work. (I discussed several such issues in Was the Obama Presidency a "last chance"? 04/16/2020)

The "Green Lantern" sneer can but used to dismiss such criticisms by conservatives who actually don't want to see the Democrats eliminate our oligarchical system of campaign finance. But it can also be employed by those who indulge the establishment Democratic habit of avoiding staging highly visible losing fights as a way of calling out unpopular Republican positions and laying the political grounds for later winning on that issue. There's nothing radical or exotic or magical-thinking about that concept. It's basic politics. The Republicans do it all the time, and sadly they are often effective in doing so. Yes, such fights involve prioritization and judgment calls like everything else in practical politics.

But in such matters, the Democrats need to practice more "Green Lantern" and less Bert the Turtle (Duck and Cover):

Again, Greg Sargent did have an important point about how mainstream pundits used that criticism in a lazy way:

Perhaps this is how the public will view Obama; perhaps it isn’t. What is clear, however, is the basic imbalance here. While neutral commentators often hold up compromise, abstractly, as the Holy Grail, the process/ideology dichotomy makes it much easier for those commentators to fault the president for failing to work the process effectively enough to secure compromise than to pillory the opposition for being ideologically uncompromising.

Brendan Nyhan, who claims to have coined the phrase, made a similar critique For the Columbia Journalism Review, The Green Lantern Theory of Sequestration 02/27/2020. In 2019, he defended the theory from criticism based on Trump use of active demagoguery as President, A Weak President Can Still Be a Dangerous One Medium 02/26/2019. He states the basis of the theory as the "premise that presidential compromise and policy failures are not the result of a lack of will but of the limitations of an office that is constitutionally weak, especially in domestic policy."

But somehow, Republican Presidents are more willing to use the powers of what the "Imperial Presidency" to fight for their own policy positions than the last two Democratic Presidents have been. The heads of governments of most democracies would presumably be surprised to hear that the American Presidency is a "constitutionally weak" one!

Ryan Cooper argues against the "Green Lantern" theory in Liberals need to stop pretending the president has no power The Week 02/11/2020:

Back in the Obama years, Democratic partisans had a contemptuous slogan for leftist critics of the president. People who insisted that the president could and should be doing more were adherents of the "Green Lantern Theory" of the presidency, after the comic book where someone in possession of a particular ring can do anything, limited only by their imagination and will. By this view, the presidency is an inherently weak office and leftists who think putting a more progressive person in the White House will make a big difference by itself are naive and foolish.

He looks at three of Obama's most consequential decisions, the bank bailout with minimal bank reform, the foreclosure crisis, and the initial economic recovery package as examples of where Obama made explicit decisions to go for a more conservative approach when a more activist approach that would have been much more beneficial for working people and the Democratic base voters than the one he chose. Those decisions were not driven by some vaguely-defined Constitutional weakness of the Presidency because those were his policy choices.

Big donors and lobbyists will be making plenty of demands on the Biden-Harris Administration. Labor and progressive groups have to do the same. And let the critics sneer about Green Lantern fantasies. Who cares, so long as the right policies get enacted?

This strikes me as a current example of the "Green Lantern" sneer

I get that people are pissed. So am I! But at Biden? Apparently people think the President-Elect has powers before he’s sworn in. Hearing a lot of suggestions that would either achieve zero or make Biden look weak by demanding things he can’t force Trump to do.

— Tim Fullerton (@TimFullerton) November 20, 2020

Uh, hello? Joe Biden is the President-elect who just won the election with a strong Electoral College margin and a popular vote lead of well over six million! Yes, he has political power! That literally makes him one of the most influential on the planet already. What he says, the priorities he sets, the people he selects to staff his administration, how he approaches Congressional relations - all of that matters. A lot!

Conservatives and corporate lobbyist know this. And there's no reason at all that labor, progressive groups, and grassroots activists should think otherwise, either. Unless they are not serious about their demands.

Here's someone who I believe is still nominally a Republican, John Dean, a longtime critic of the authoritarian trends in the Republican Party not only during the Trump Presidency but also in real time during the Cheney-Bush Administration, making a demand on the, yes, the already extremely powerful Joe Biden:

Trump is openly and actively violating federal criminal laws in his efforts to overturn his defeat. President-elect Biden should put Trump on notice that he will request his attorney general investigate criminal efforts to undo the election. Trump is playing Biden as a weak fool!

— John W. Dean (@JohnWDean) November 21, 2020