Live and die by reconciliation

Politico: "How Trump can use Obamacare to kill Obamacare - The same executive authority the Obama administration used to implement the law may now be used to dismantle it."

Conservatives who railed against Barack Obama's vast powers to build up the Affordable Care Act declared vindication Saturday with President Donald Trump’s executive order to tear it apart.

"For me, it’s a mix of irony and schadenfreude," says Josh Blackman, a law professor who's written two books that criticized the Obama administration's implementation of the law. "I’ve warned for years that, with a new president in the White House, the exact same powers could be used for different purposes. That’s what we’re seeing now, to a T."

This is why Obama's legacy is written on an Etch-a-Sketch: he couldn't be bothered to do the hard work of building legislative support.  Without the smoke and mirrors of executive orders and reconciliation tricks (remember "deem and pass?") everything from Obamacare to the Iran Deal to the Paris Accords can be wiped away with the wave of Trump's pen.