The demise of “Executive Orders” would be a great step forward for the American people and a great step back for wannabee authoritarian/dictatorial politicians. Trump’s total abuse of this form of governing has brought the major flaw of the practice into the light of day for most Americans. It basically allows a president, any president, to issue orders on any subject he/she feels like, without restriction or controls of any sort. It doesn’t matter if those orders flagrantly violate the law, the Constitution, common sense, or any sort of moral value, there appears to be no mechanism for stopping a presidential executive order. If he can effectively eliminate the “14th Ammendment” to the Constitution, which guarantees birthright status for U.S. citizenship, imagine what else he can do.
The Supreme Court should be ashamed of itself, and publicly castrated by the media, for their decision to even address this total abuse of the Constitution, let alone for holding out the hope to Trump that they might actually approve of his action.
Executive Orders are a major flaw in our system of governance that has always been there, but has almost never been exploited to this level before. As soon as Trump is out of the way, it behooves Congress to implement strict controls of “Executive Orders”. Trump has pushed that envelope way further than any previous president, but his actions have also set a precedent for future “executive orders” of an even worse and dangerous kind from future presidents. Currently, what’s to stop some deranged person in the White House persuading a semi-senile president to sign “Executive Orders” to blowup the presidential palace in Bogota or the home of Elon Musk just because that person doesn’t like the resident … or from perpetrating far more dangerous scenarios. The answer appears to be …. very little.
The idea that Trump came up with over three hundred executive orders to sign on his first day in office is ludicrous. Aside from his obvious mental incapacity to concentrate long enough to do that, it’s almost physically impossible for any normal person. It has to have come from someone else’s agenda – in this case, Project 2025. That means that any group that manages to get its figurehead into the White House can control the country without Congress, or anyone else, being involved. It is a classic way of destroying any sense of democracy. The system of “Executive Orders has to go, before it becomes a total liability for the country.
The question then becomes, how can it be done, because no president will have any incentive to restrict their own power by implementing such a change?
The current situation, and Trump’s recent statement that he would invalidate all of Joe Biden’s executive orders written with an autopen, gives us a clue as to what might just work.
It occurred to me recently that when a democratic president is elected in the future, whenever that might be, he/she could start by writing a single executive order cancelling all the executive orders that Trump has signed. It could be written in a way that it just says “all” executive orders rather than having to list them, mainly because Trump has issued so many that almost no-one could list them all anyway.
Once that happened, every future administration, as well as Congress, would realise that the only way to make changes permanent, or at least semi-permanent, would be for Congress to pass a law, preferably without a sunset clause. It might even push Congress into passing a law that bans “Executive Orders” completely in order to bring law-making back into Congress where it belongs in a democracy.
I wish I could think of a quicker, more reliable, way of eliminating the very dangerous practice of “Executive Orders”. In a way, it’s good that Trump’s actions have highlighted the potential dangers of the practice. At the very least, hopefully, it will provoke many more people to think about the problem and how it can be fixed.
If any of my readers have ideas that might work, I would be delighted to hear from you, and I will definitely publish your ideas, with credit, in future blogs.
