Obama Warns Trump Not to Overuse Executive Powers

EXCERPT:

INSKEEP: "Should President-elect Trump, once he’s inaugurated, use his executive powers in the same way that you have?"
OBAMA: "I think that he is entirely within his lawful power to do so. Keep in mind though that my strong preference has always been to legislate when I can get legislation done. In my first two years, I wasn’t relying on executive powers, because I had big majorities in the Congress and we were able to get bills done, get bills passed. And even after we lost the majorities in Congress, I bent over backwards consistently to try to find compromise and a legislative solution to some of the big problems that we’ve got — a classic example being immigration reform, where I held off for years in taking some of the executive actions that I ultimately took in pursuit of a bipartisan solution — one that, by the way, did pass through the Senate on a bipartisan basis with our help.

"I was very proud of that. I went out of my way to make sure our help was behind the scenes so that Republicans didn’t feel as if it was going to hurt them politically. At the end of the day, John Boehner and the House Republicans couldn’t pull the trigger on getting it done. And it was only then, after we had exhausted efforts for bipartisan reform that we took some additional steps on immigration executive actions. So my suggestion to the president-elect is, you know, going through the legislative process is always better, in part because it’s harder to undo."