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Comment by djrogers | Hacker News Reader

Re #4 - we saw this throughout the Obama tenure as well, more executive orders, more expectations of the President to create and change law rather than execute it, etc.

Point is, it's not just Trump - or Trump and Obama - it's been a slow but steady march toward treating the Office like a monarch...

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we saw this throughout the Obama tenure as well, more executive orders...

Number of executive orders per president, per year in office[1]:

  Theodore Roosevelt    144.7
  William Howard Taft   181.0
  Woodrow Wilson        225.4
  Warren G. Harding     216.9
  Calvin Coolidge       215.2
  Herbert Hoover        242.0
  Franklin D. Roosevelt 307.8
  Harry S. Truman       116.7
  Dwight D. Eisenhower  60.5
  John F. Kennedy       75.4
  Lyndon B. Johnson     62.9
  Richard Nixon         62.3
  Gerald Ford           69.1
  Jimmy Carter          80.0
  Ronald Reagan         47.6
  George H. W. Bush     41.5
  Bill Clinton          45.5
  George W. Bush        36.4
  Barack Obama          34.6

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_federal_...

I think that if you looked at the scope of executive orders over time it would be instructive. Teddy Roosevelt executive orders were simple and limited.[1] Modern executive orders have very wide ranging consequences (such as allowing departments to share electronic surveillance without a warrant).

[1] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Author:Theodore_Roosevelt/Exe...

Examples include, "Authorizing Appointment of Translator in Bureau of Insular Affairs Without Examination," "Authorizing Reinstatement of Charles B. Terry as Clerk in Post Office Department Without Examination," "Amending Civil Service Rules to Except Commissioners of National Military Parks from Examination," etc.

> I think that if you looked at the scope of executive orders over time it would be instructive

Indeed, but instructive in an opposite direction IMO.

The sum of Obama's executive orders pale in comparison to the other Roosevelt's singular Executive Order 9066, for example. And that was hardly the only controversial FDR order.

Vietnam was really the first time that a war-time president didn't suspend the civil liberties of a crap-load of Americans.

Sure, but we've also been in a perpetual "state of emergency" since 1979: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/10/22/presi...

The raw numbers are not really useful. There are a lot of EOs which do not push the bounds of presidential authority (awarding medals, ordering flags to half-mast, etc). They are not comparable to EOs which, for example, order the government to not enforce immigration law, or use torture.

Right, so we're just arbitrarily moving the goalposts now that the data doesn't back the claim. Got it.

Not arbitrarily, but with good reason.

It sometimes makes sense to move the goalposts when they no longer work as a mechanism for measuring the metrics of the sport in question.

In this case, the total number of executive orders doesn't speak to the degree to which executive power is used to do things other than execute.

> but with good reason.

No, a hypothesis was asserted, and quickly disproven by data. Without stronger data, the rest of these responses are called "backpedaling", no matter how positive your language might sound.

Yeah, the naked assertion of "more executive orders" is plainly false by the numbers. But, looking at GP's point more charitably, does that invalidate the spirit of the comment? I think it's clear that it does not. Instead, obviously we must consider the overall force of executive action in creating or changing policy, in order to evaluate whether the contents of this argument are supported by data.

And, FWIW, it's likely that the comment doesn't consider the absurd lengths to which executive power were pushed at various times in the first century of the republic, not only to create policy but also to eviscerate the decisions of the judicial branch (obviously "John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it" comes to mind).

This is a rich and complex topics; moving the goalposts away from a discussion of the number of signed executive orders is quite sensible IMO.

but the next step would be to cite a survey of the content of those orders, not make a one-sentence claim.

Agreed. That is probably beyond the purview of a HN comment. If you are interested in the topic, there are a number of current political science researchers who focus on the powers of the presidency. Nancy Kassop (my thesis professor) might be an interesting author with whom to start - her work is precise yet easy-to-understand.

You have a very cynical view of analysis of executive orders!

I think it's totally fine to classify EOs in one bucket for half mast flag memorials and EOs like Nixon's establishment of the EPA in another bucket.

The content of the orders are probably just as important as the number. If not more so. But it's hard to measure the relevant stats in an objective way that satisfies both sides.

Obama took unilateral action with Presidential Memoranda instead of Executive Orders.

"Like executive orders, presidential memoranda don't require action by Congress. They have the same force of law as executive orders and often have consequences just as far-reaching. And some of the most significant actions of the Obama presidency have come not by executive order but by presidential memoranda."

[0] http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/16/obama...

Is this some kind of fact based comment?

Some of those numbers seem to be affected by significant world events (world wars, economic depressions). I wonder if filtering out some of the EOs specific to those kinds of things might smooth things out a bit?

  Donald J. Trump       113

(extrapolated from 23 EOs in 74 days, as of this writing.)

more details on EO's per president

http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/orders.php

He only resorted to the EOs because of the obstructionism from Congress. What else is a president to do when faced with such petulance?

Nothing. He should be able to do nothing.

That's the point of having three branches of government. A president has no god-given right to push through whatever policies they want; congress has no obligation to help.

> nothing

That's also a failure of checks and balances.

Of course the presidency can do all sorts of things without Congress! It's not and was never intended to be a ceremonial position. Or a position bound to the will of congress in all things! Hence "separation of powers", not "devolution of powers to Congress and the judiciary".

Indeed, kevin_thibedeau's observation is SPOT ON, and is exactly how things should and were explicitly designed to work!

The presidency has certain powers that are typically only exercised during a divided government. This has been true since the very beginning of the union. That shouldn't be surprising at all! It's intrinsic to an effective separation of powers. If the presidency proceeded in identical fashion regardless of who Controlled congress, then that would be a clear indication that the separation of powers has failed.

The presidency should do what he thinks he has the authority to do. Congress should pass explicit laws limiting that power if it feels the presidency has become too powerful, using the purse as leverage when necessary. The courts should mediate inevitable conflicts and check the abuses of a unified executive and legislature. That is separation of powers.

> This has been true since the very beginning of the union.

Not entirely true. Executive orders (and similar powers of the executive), as far as I understand, have significantly evolved since the founding of the US.

The ability to use them is implied rather than explicitly granted by the US Constitution, and use in practice (and what constitutes overreach) has largely been defined through the US Supreme Court.

Side note: this right was not explicitly given to the Supreme Court either in our founding documents and was largely hammered out by sheer force of will by John Marshall in Marbury vs Madison (perhaps one of the greatest cases of all time, replete with some seriously shady last-days-in-office chicanery by John Adams) [1] [2]. I'd highly recommend listening to the podcast episode in the second link.

Based on Wikipedia's numbers [3] (which seem reasonable, given that they weren't called "executive orders" until ~1900 when they were retroactively numbered them back to Lincoln), Theodore Roosevelt could definitely be said to be the first major user.

By my count, the 25 presidents before Teddy Roosevelt signed 1,262 orders. Roosevelt signed 1,081 himself (in two terms).

Notably, if I'm reading the figures right, both of Roosevelt's terms were characterized by large majorities in the Senate and slim but still majorities in the House.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marbury_v._Madison

[2] http://www.wnyc.org/story/giggly-blue-robot/

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order_(United_Stat...

I wonder if that's actually a net positive thing in practice. In parliamentary systems, found in many of the most objectively democratic countries in the world, the legislative and executive branches are more closely interlinked than in presidential systems. Because the party that gets the most seats in a parliamentary elections gets to form the executive (with other parties if necessary), and the executive parties typically control the majority of the seats, any legislation proposed by the executive usually passes.

FYI, there's an article on Vox that argues that presidential systems are inherently prone to collapse and that it's a miracle America made it this far: http://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8120063/american-democracy-doome...

One interesting point the article raises was that one of the few things saving the American political system from collapse was our ugly racial history.

Parliamentary systems have other checks that the American Presidential system lacks (of course this varies somewhat widely by state, from Britain to Israel to Canada there is something of a spectrum).

Nothing. He should be able to do nothing. That's the point of having three branches of government

No it isn't. It's not a system in which one branch can fully incapacitate another. The goal is still governing, not doing nothing. Recall that this isn't the founders' first pass at organizing a government and in part a response to a previous one not being able to get much done.

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