Trump Tests the Limits of Executive Orders
Well before President Donald Trump returned to office, his supporters boasted that he would start the second term with a flurry of executive actions. The new president exceeded expectations with an avalanche of pardons, orders, and edicts on matters great and small. Wide-ranging in their scope, the orders “encompassed sweeping moves to reimagine the country’s relationship with immigration, its economy, global health, the environment and even gender roles,” noted USA Today.
Some should be welcomed by anybody hoping for more respect for liberty by government employees. Others extend state power in ways that are worrisome or even illegitimate. All continue the troubling
trend, over the course of decades and administrations from both major parties, for the president to assume the role of an elected monarch.
Because executive branch officials interpret and enforce thickets of laws and administrative rules under which we try to live, guidance from the boss is powerful. Interpreted one way, a rule regulating unfinished gun parts leaves people free to pursue their hobbies; interpreted another, those owning the parts are suddenly felons. The president can push interpretations either way.
Executive orders are basically interoffice memos from the boss to executive branch agencies. That doesn’t sound like much—and at first, historically, they weren’t. Executive orders evolved into their modern form from notes and directives sent by the president to members of the Cabinet and other executive branch officials. Nobody tried to catalog them until 1907.
“If it seems as if more recent presidents have had more power than even Washington or Lincoln, it’s not an illusion,” Harvard Law School’s Erin Peterson wrote in 2019. “The last three presidents in particular have strengthened the powers
Article from Reason.com
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