This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, August 12, 2020.

I'm Kele Brown. Orders regarding cash for the unemployed, student loan payments and home

evictions emanating from the White House over the weekend have the suspicious look of legislation,

normally and properly the role of Congress. So what did these orders include and are they proper?

And if they are, is it another case of Congress

handing its own power over to the executive

with the predictable results?

Cato's Gene Healy comments.

I, years ago, remember conservatives complaining about Barack Obama's claim that he has a

pen and a phone and those are extremely powerful weapons, and now we have some Republicans appearing to not have

that much of a problem with the President of the United States spending billions of dollars

without their input, without their approval.

Right, I mean we already knew President Trump had a phone from his, the fresh hell of his Twitter

feed every morning.

He has discovered that he has a pen much like Barack Obama

with his pen and phone initiative in his second term. So what happened over the weekend was after negotiations about extending portions of the

Cares Act that were set to expire or it already expired like the $600 week in

supplemental unemployment payments after the negotiations with the Speaker Nancy Pelosi and

majority leader Chuck Schumer stalled out President Trump went back to the pen

and the phone and signed four presidential directives,

one executive order and three presidential memoranda if the technical details matter and two out of those four are pretty

uncontroversial is actually the executive order is the one that does the least that's on evictions and foreclosures basically just of renters and homeowners. There's another one deferring student loan payments through the end of the year. It's pretty clear that Congress directly delegated that authority so that one's not legally controversial. But then there are these other two deferring

...