Executive Dictatorship: A Look At Some Of The Most Egregious EO’s
![EO](https://i0.wp.com/ordinary-times.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/U.S._President_Joe_Biden_signs_executive_orders.jpg?resize=720%2C405&ssl=1)
President Joe Biden signs 17 executive orders on his first day in office, January 20th, 2021. Photo by DiogoC300, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Executive orders (EO), what are they? In the simplest terms, they are a way for a chief executive of a state or nation to issue instructions or decrees. Wikipedia differs on this a bit:
An executive order is a means of issuing federal directives in the United States, used by the President of the United States, that manages operations of the federal government. The legal or constitutional basis for executive orders has multiple sources. Article Two of the United States Constitution gives the president broad executive and enforcement authority to use their discretion to determine how to enforce the law or to otherwise manage the resources and staff of the executive branch. The ability to make such orders is also based on expressed or implied Acts of Congress that delegate to the president some degree of discretionary power.
Article two does not grant any such powers in my reading of it.
Expressed Act of congress? Honestly, I’m not sure where to find a legit reference for this, as the use goes too far back.
Implied?
So what really are executive orders? Simply, a way for a president to use dictatorial style power and usurp Congressional authority. Let’s take a look at some of the most egregious of them from the U.S. National Archives:
Let’s start in the modern era with Franklin D. Roosevelt, who issued 3,728 executive orders while in office, making him the most prolific user of them:
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- EO 6102 April 1933 forbade private ownership of gold bullion, coins, or certificates, jewelry was exempt. Citizens had one month to turn it in or possibly face jail time. This order prevented U.S. citizens from owning large amounts of gold until the 1970s when our money went FIAT.
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- EO 6201 April 1933 Forced all Domestic gold producers to sell their gold only to the U.S. treasury at prices the treasure set.
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- EO 7034 April 1935 Created the Works Progress Administration to put the unemployed to work.
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- EO 8773 June 1941 Seized the North American Aviation Company Plant at Inglewood, California because the union was on strike.
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- EO 8843 Restricted installment purchasing i.e.: lines of credit issued by banks—today we call these credit cards.
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- EO 9066 The internment of Japanese Americans, lead to the false imprisonment of 127,000 mostly 2nd and 3rd generation Japanese Americans from February 1942 until the Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) deemed it unconstitutional in December 1944.
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- EO 9508 December 1944 Seizure of Montgomery Ward properties—again a union strike
Harry S. Truman (fun fact! Mr. Truman had no middle name and picked the letter S because it sounded nice):
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- EO 10340 April 1953 Nationalization of American steel mills and were placed under the control of Secretary of Commerce—again a strike but this time during the Korean war.
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- EO 9540 April 1945 Seizure of Cities Service Refining Corporation—union strike
Okay, let’s be honest: How many people want me to keep at this? Not me, that’s for sure. The wording is something from a lawyer’s nightmare on most of these things, so let’s cut to the chase.
Executive orders pretty much grant carte blanche power to a president. We elect a person to read what congress sends them, and either sign it “yes” or veto it. We expect them to discuss treaties with foreign nations, and hand said treaty to the Senate to either accept or veto it. We do not elect a four year one-or-two term dictator and since Mr. Roosevelt, that is progressively more of what we have.
So what can we do? In my opinion we have two clear options:
Option one: We lobby congress to institute a Constitutional amendment banning and repealing all executive 0rders at all levels. We are in the 21st century any governing body can instantly communicate via conference call or virtual meeting so there is no reason for a president, governor, county executive, mayor, or anyone else in office, be they appointed or elected, to need dictatorial powers. They should be forced to ask their respective legislative bodies for what they think we need. We elect representatives to be OUR eyes, ears, and mouth in government; this eliminates one person’s whims from becoming de-facto law.
Option two, again best done with an amendment because no person in power is going to cede power: We lobby congress to create an amendment to the Constitution making all executive orders expire in 90 days and automatically be immediately introduced into the appropriate legislative body as written to be voted upon. The order could then be voted “no” or passed but not for more than one year, at which time it can be reevaluated and rewritten into law or thrown out. All previous executive orders would be considered voided.
My thoughts after the last two years are: we need option one before someone decides to go too far and we have a Dictator in Chief instead of a duly elected president.
SO from inside the bureaucracy – most if not all federal statutes are too vague in their language to actually do anything with. Doubly so since Congress decided to create the farce that they don’t do earmarks anymore. Which means that in a lot of cases, Presidents of both parties actually do have to do a lot of interpreting in order to fulfill their duties to take care that the laws passed by Congress are faithfully implemented.
That aside, as we’ve seen with the immigration debacle, Congress has become quite willing to NOT legislate on important issue presented to it. Which Means the Executive has to act, and the only real way to act is for the Executive to string together whatever legal authority does exist in an executive order. And this isn’t because Presidents are failing to propose legislation – its because Congress is choosing not to legislate.
So yes, Congress could and should solve this problem – but you’re aiming at the wrong target with your solutions.Report
My favorites are the details of organizations. Congress writes, “There shall be an Office of XYZ within the Department of the Interior, with a budget of $40,000,000.” Someone has to decide that means a junior assistant bureau head, two assistant heads, and 15 staff. Do I want Congress to make that decision? Based on my time as a budget analyst for a state legislature, probably not. The Colorado legislature attempts to manage both dollars and headcount in the budget, and it’s an ongoing nightmare.Report
Congress attempts to manage our head count by authorizing and reauthorizing FTE billets. How we fill them is up to us, but they control the total. So when a new office like you describe is stood up, if there’s no additional billets it gets … interesting.Report
What size groups do they attempt to manage over? My state’s legislature — at least when I was there, and I don’t know but certainly hope they’ve changed — tried to do it at a micro level. Eg, group X has an authorized FTE headcount of three, and a salary budget of $164,000 (pension, benefits, and things like floorspace were accounted for separately). There were so many things that went wrong with that.Report
I like option 2, myself.
I think that if an order is good, it ought to pass as a law.
If it’s bad, it should automatically sunset.
And it’d be a good way for a president to send clean bills to the House.Report
I don’t think option 1 or option 2 are particularly likely to happen at any time. Extreme partisanship has reduced Congresses ability to do much, maybe anything. So for a President to enact any part of his or her agenda, he or she needs to use executive orders.Report
Right.
American legislative bodies CAN and DO govern. Look at any of the states where one party has a trifecta and you see that the legislative body flexes its power easily.
There isn’t any structural defect here.
This Congress can’t legislate because doing so might give the President a win. Even something so simple as “wear a G-D mask and get the G-D shot” gets mired in partisan obstruction.
About 40%of the American electorate is getting exactly what they want.Report
And yet the President just signed a $1 trillion infrastructure bill 2 days ago that required bipartisan support.Report
It received 13 R votes in the House, mainly from Republicans who know they will be redistricted into more D friendly seats. On the other hand, we also have a system of government that raises the most cranky and eccentric members of Congress from backbencher to co-President when there are slim majorities.Report
And the Senate vote was 69 to 30.
It should be difficult to pass sweeping and/or incredibly expensive legislation.Report
Few — possibly no — state legislative bodies have adopted the kinds of rules or statutory restrictions that Congress has hamstrung itself with. California’s super-majority requirements on budgets was an aberration done by voters, and not self-imposed. Ditto for Colorado’s requirement that tax rate increases must be submitted to the voters.Report
Many acts of Congress contain language explicitly assigning discretion on implementation to the President or another Cabinet officer (“The Secretary for Unicorn Farts shall issue regulations…”). This gives the legislators deniability, as well as opportunities for ‘constituent service’ (“Your Congressman Porcbarell goes to bat for YOU against those mean ol’ bureaucrats!”).Report
(fun fact! Mr. Truman had no middle name and picked the letter S because it sounded nice)
[Linda Richman voice] This is neither fun nor a fact. Discuss.Report
The middle initial “S” in Truman’s name stood for the names of his two grandfathers, Solomon Young and Anderson Shipp Truman.
https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/genealogy/?m=g_essayReport
Yes. The tale is that his parents couldn’t agree on which grandfather to name him for, so this was the compromise.Report