Dana Bash: GOP support for Trump's executive orders is ‘Twilight Zone’ after 8 years of Obama bashing

CNN’s Dana Bash called out the GOP’s hypocritical embrace of Donald Trump’s use of executive orders considering the party’s steadfast disavowal of former President Barack Obama’s use of executive authority, noting it’s “a little bit of 'The Twilight Zone.'”

“To listen to a Republican president come out at the retreat of Republican members of Congress and spending the first fifteen minutes bragging about all of the executive orders he signed after these Republicans spent eight years railing against the Democratic president, President Obama, as an imperial president because he signed so many executive orders, was like a little bit of The Twilight Zone,” Bash said after watching President Trump’s speech at the GOP retreat.

During the Obama administration, GOP leaders including Paul Ryan, Chris Christie and John Kasich slammed then-president Obama’s use of executive orders, calling them “lawless” and “king-like.”

At the GOP retreat Thursday, Ryan refused to acknowledge the party’s sudden embrace of executive power is hypocritical, claiming Trump is only using his authority to undo Obama’s orders.

"President Obama used his pen and phone and executive orders to exceed his power in our perspective," Ryan told reporters. ”Everything that President Obama did by executive order this new president can undo. We would like to see these things undone, and we would like to see power restored to people in the states and not the federal government, and that's what this president is doing."

In addition to rolling back some of Obama’s executive orders, the president has also issued new edicts of his own, directing the construction of a border wall along the southern border and threatening to withhold funding from sanctuary cities that harbor undocumented immigrants.

“I know some of the executive orders were to ‘unsign,’ in his words, some of what President Obama did, but not all of them,” Bash told the panel Thursday after watching Trump’s speech.

Bash continued to say that it was, “a little jarring,” that the Commander in Chief is using the power of the pen to force Congress’ hand. “He’s forcing the Congress to find to figure out a way to pay for it because of the pen he used in an executive order, not legislatively,” Bash said.


Watch the video below, via CNN: