On Thursday the White House issued a much-anticipated executive order on religious freedom. The editors of National Review argue that this order tries to accomplish what it cannot, and does little if anything to fix substantive problems:
[The order] is a vague and unworkable mishmash of executive direction that has the potential to make the problem worse.
First, the president purports to, as he put it, “get rid of and totally destroy the Johnson Amendment,” a law that forbids tax-exempt religious organizations to endorse or oppose candidates from the pulpit. While religious organizations already enjoy the right to advocate and agitate in the political arena, the Johnson Amendment represents a free-speech restriction that is almost certainly unconstitutional [and] at odds with a tradition of First Amendment jurisprudence barring the linkage of government benefits to the restriction of unrelated constitutional rights. The problem, which President Trump does not quite seem to comprehend, is that an executive order cannot simply overturn a piece of legislation. . . .
Instead [of working with Congress to craft new legislation], President Trump will imitate President Barack Obama’s approach to illegal immigrants and simply order that “prosecutorial discretion” be expanded and codified in such a way as to forbid categorically enforcing federal law. . . . We are . . . skeptical that such an approach would last five minutes should another Democrat end up in the White House, which, alas, is bound to happen someday, and which would leave churches vulnerable to future sanction for deeds done under the assumption that the prosecutors would be permanently sidelined.
Read more on National Review: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/447348/trump-religious-liberty-executive-order-johnson-amendment