When he first became president, Donald Trump issued a slew of executive orders to overturn much of former President Barack Obama’s legacy.
Trump claimed to have been a more energetic chief executive than most of his immediate predecessors going back nearly a century – and there was truth to that.
“Trump has signed more executive orders (30) in his opening 100 days than did former president Obama (19), former president George W. Bush (11) or even former president Lyndon Johnson (26),” The Washington Post reported on April 25, 2017.
Critics howled about the hypocrisy. That’s because Trump denounced President Barack Obama for his “pen and phone” leadership. “We have a president that can’t get anything done so he just keeps signing executive orders all over the place,” then-candidate Trump said on one occasion. “I don’t think he even tries anymore,” Trump said another time. “I think he just signs executive actions.”
If we’ve seen anything since Democrat Joe Biden became president, it is that he’s launching the third “pen and phone” Obama term – or a revolution in authoritarian power.
According to the National Archives, Trump ended up issuing 55 executive orders in his first year, and 220 during his one term.
Had Trump won a second term, and maintained that pace, he would have far surpassed his last three predecessors, all of whom served two terms.
Obama handed down 38 orders in his inaugural year and 276 overall. Republican George W. Bush issued 54 in year one, and 291 in all. Democrat Bill Clinton signed just one order during his first two years, and only 40 in his third. Yet he picked up the pace, and finished with 254, comparable to his successors.
In contrast, Biden’s demonstrating that those four guys are the junior varsity.
He authored a whopping 40 executive orders in his first seven days, NBC News reported on Tuesday.
That’s on pace to reach 2,080 in his first year, and more than 8,000 in his first term.
Biden’s orders have not been for show either.
Some examples:
He reimplemented America’s involvement in the Paris climate accords; killed the Keystone XL pipeline and 11,000 jobs with it; allowed transgender people back into the military; asked for an analysis of paying the federal workforce a $15 an hour minimum wage; green-lighted travel for people from a handful of majority-Muslim nations considered sponsors of terrorism; created a way for illegal immigrants to remain in the country and yanked funding for Trump’s border wall.
The image, and the danger, is to wonder why we need Congress if we permit the president to behave this way.
This situation is not what the Founding Fathers envisioned, and it represents a real threat to the country.
Legal scholar Tara Branum, writing a lengthy 2002 article in the University of Notre Dame’s Journal of Legislation, noted the thinking of someone like former Clinton adviser Paul Begala – who once said, “Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kind of cool.” – was an affront to our system,
“The increased use of executive orders and other presidential directives is a fundamental problem in modern-day America. The Constitution does not give one individual an ‘executive pen’ enabling that individual to single-handedly write his preferred policy into law,” Branum observed.
“Despite this lack of constitutional authority, presidential directives have been increasingly used both by Republicans and Democrats to promulgate laws and to support public policy initiatives in a manner that circumvents the proper lawmaking body, the United States Congress. It would be foolhardy to ignore the danger inherent in this situation, simply because one might like the individual currently holding the presidential pen,” she added.
“It would be hypocritical, as well as dangerous, to seek change when a president from the opposing political party is in power, but to ignore the problem once a president from one’s own party has been elected.”
Branum also wrote, “While the current president may back acceptable policies or refrain from using his executive power in a tyrannical fashion, there is no guarantee that all future presidents will continue to do so as well.”
“This is a disgraceful state of affairs. It contravenes the intent of the Founding Fathers, who expected that each branch would keep the others from overstepping their constitutional bounds. … As President Rutherford B. Hayes stated, eventually ‘a Napoleon’ will become president, and our nation will then certainly pay the price.”
Is that what we have now? Napoleon Bidenite?