Biden's Orders Continue the Presidency's Slide Toward Elective Monarchy

"Ease up on the executive actions, Joe," The New York Times urged recently inaugurated President Biden last week.

While supportive of the president's broadly progressive agenda, the newspaper's editorial board found his flurry of executive orders and other unilateral actions both troubling and vulnerable to easy reversal by future presidents.

While partisans tend to pick sides on executive power depending on who holds the White House, the devolution of the presidency into something resembling elective monarchy should worry everybody.

"When carried out pursuant to legislative or constitutional authority, executive orders are unobjectionable," the Cato Institute's Gene Healy observed in his 2008 book, The Cult of the Presidency.

If the refusal of lawmakers to enact a president's policies is justification for unilateral executive action, then a slide toward elective monarchy is inevitable.

"Biden issued 17 executive orders on his first two days in office, compared with Trump who issued one and Obama who issued two. Biden issued three proclamations, while Trump and Obama each issued one."

"Trump is on pace to sign more executive orders than any president in the last 50 years," CNN reported in 2017 of the 45th president.

https://reason.com/2021/02/01/bidens-executive-orders-continue-the-presidencys-slide-toward-elective-monarchy/