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ד”ר שני וינדר תציג בכנס את המאמר:

Extraordinary policymaking powers of the executive branch: a new approach

Abstract

The U.S. executive branch has been taking an active agenda-setting role to advance and shape profound policy determinations that are heavily value-laden and attempt to solve large-scale national—sometimes even global—policy challenges. These high-stakes, or “extraordinary” policy determinations leverage congressional dysfunction as justification for expanding and redefining executive authority.  At the same time, public law doctrines have become largely insensitive to legislative dysfunction and political reality. As a representative example, one of the significant failures of the current judicial approach is that courts tend to ignore global collective action challenges in their analysis. While congressional dysfunction affects the entire world and causes a worldwide gridlock, these aspects are overlooked. As the judicial approach to analyzing these problems has been inadequate, a more nuanced and sophisticated view of extraordinary executive policymaking is needed.  This Article develops a comprehensive theoretical and doctrinal framework for evaluating the legality of extraordinary executive policymaking initiatives. This Article provides a more accurate account and benefits from the analysis of two case studies from the Obama administration. The first is the Environmental Protection Agency’s interpretation of the Clean Air Act to address climate change via the Clean Power Plan (CPP) regulations, and the second is the immigration reform initiatives, enacted through nonenforcement policies. While some scholars and members of the legal community viewed these actions as executive overreach, President Obama felt compelled to act in order to prevent what he saw as environmental and humanitarian tragedies in the United States and around the world. The analysis of the case studies considers a timely debate on the nature and legitimacy of these expansive executive actions, an analysis which can inform future debates surrounding unilateral actions by the current administration and future presidents. This Article proposes that allowing the executive branch to promote policy goals in high-stakes domains should be justified in situations where the executive is able to sufficiently establish legitimacy of the extraordinary executive action. To demonstrate this, I propose a novel multifactor test, offering guidelines to the question of when it is appropriate to embrace an extraordinary exercise of executive authority. The ultimate purpose of the proposed factors is to underscore the legitimacy that is missing from the contemporary legal framework. The proposed set of criteria will allow scholars and stakeholders take an intense inquiry, and the lessons the case studies teach us inform the multi-factor test criteria. This Article also argues that normatively, there is a stronger justification in favor of the executive action where the policymaking initiative at hand is designed to promote solutions to global challenges that impact the United States and require transnational collective action.