The Executive Order Hypocrisy

What do presidents as diverse as William McKinley, George W. Bush, Harry Truman and both Teddy and Franklin D. Roosevelt have in common? Each one issued more executive orders than Barack Obama. The chart from The American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is useful in charting both the number, and the frequency, of executive orders both past and present. Two things are quite evident when you start to look at the numbers. The first, interesting as a student of history, is that up until the presidency of Ulysses S. Grant, fated to be president at the ending of Reconstruction, no president issued more than one hundred executive orders during their time in office. After Chester Arthur, no president has issued fewer than one hundred executive orders, even those who served only a single term. 

The second thing looking at the numbers reveals is that Barack Obama has issued fewer executive orders than nearly any president in the last century, with the only two exceptions being Gerald Ford and George H.W. Bush. Even Warren G. Harding, a famously laissez-faire president when it came to the economy, issued over five hundred executive orders. Calvin Coolidge, Teddy Roosevelt, and Woodrow Wilson each issued over one thousand executive orders, Franklin Roosevelt over three thousand. When you examine the average number of executive orders per year, arguably a better metric of how frequently they are used as this makes comparison between one-term presidents and two-term presidents easier, Obama looks positively restrained in his use of executive orders, having issued thus far an average of 33.58 executive orders per year, a lower rate than any president since Grover Cleveland's first term of office. 

The reality of this puts the lie to one of the GOP's favorite lines, that this president has somehow become a tyrant, comparable to George III, as Karl Rove cynically put it. Rove's statement is particularly ironic given that he served as adviser to George W. Bush, who issued 291 executive orders to Obama's 182. While he protested that the Bush Administration was far less reckless in the use of executive powers than the Obama Administration, this ignores completely the greater use of executive orders as well as the controversy over Bush's signing statements, many of which stated bluntly that while the bill would become law, the Bush Administration had no intention of enforcing it. Hypocrisy at its finest.

The greatest hypocrisy of all is encapsulated in Speaker of the House John Boehner's attempt to sue the president over his use of executive orders, specifically an order delaying implementation of the employer mandate of the Affordable Care Act, a provision of a law that was opposed completely and consistently by the GOP, including over fifty attempts to repeal or defund the law itself. This baseless lawsuit is little more than an election-year distraction to fire up a Republican base still enmeshed in their hatred of both the Affordable Care Act and the president, and to try and keep the focus of the year's campaigns away from the fact that this Congress is on track to be even less productive than the famous "Do-Nothing" Congress that Harry Truman campaigned against in 1948. To sue the president for delaying implementation of part of a law they themselves opposed is a hypocrisy so disgusting that a term adequate to describe it does not exist. 

Instead of working with the ruling party for the common good, to help advance solutions for issues ranging from healthcare and education to immigration and climate change, Republicans have spent the last few years doing their very best to block anything and everything, even making sure that the eventual renewal of the Violence Against Women Act, which should have been easy, was no sure thing. That bill did become law, though 138 representatives did vote against it (they were all Republicans) along with 22 Senators (all Republicans). Our country deserves better than this. Frivolous lawsuits and hypocritical grandstanding are no substitute for actual governance, and the Republicans shouldn't be rewarded for this behavior with control of the Senate in November. Having them gerrymander their way to a House majority is surely bad enough.