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History of Presidential Executive Orders published LDR 11/16/16

The most recent Executive Order signed by President Obama was done on November 4 and entitled “Advancing The Global Health Security Agenda to Achieve a World Safe and Secure from Infectious Disease Threats” based on the premise that “promoting global health security is a core tenet of our national strategy for countering biological threats.”

It is a lengthy document with multi-paragraph subsections beginning with instructions to convene a Global Health Security Agenda Interagency Review Council.  It goes on to provide  separate directions to the heads of the Departments of State, Defense, Justice, Agriculture, Health and Human Services, and Homeland Security.  Also to the  Office of Management and Budget, Agency For International Development, Environmental Protection Agency, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and “such other agencies as the agencies set forth above deem appropriate.”

The purpose of  this column today is not for me to make judgment upon whether or not this executive order is good or bad for the country but simply to set forth an example  of the process of developing and the extent of Executive Orders issued by any president.

According to the Federal Register, President Obama has signed 32 Executive Orders just since the first of January, 2016.

Presidents have issued Executive Orders since the beginning of our country.  President George Washington issued 8 of them.  The only president who didn’t issue even one was President William Henry Harrison, but this is not too surprising considering the fact that he was only in office one month before he died of pneumonia.

The presidents who only issued one such order were John Adams, James Madison, and James Monroe.  John Quincy Adams was the next lowest with only 3 of them.
The president who ordered the most (3,721) was Franklin D.  Roosevelt.  Other presidents with orders in excess of 1000 were Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson and Calvin Coolidge.

In recent history, here are the totals:  Reagan - 381, George Bush - 166, Clinton - 364, George W. Bush - 291 and Obama - 256.

The above information came from the Presidential Project website, a non-profit and non-partisan organization which claims to be the leading source of presidential documents on the internet.  Its archives contain 119,643 documents and grows every day.  It is the only online resource that has consolidated, coded and organized into a single searchable database the messages and papers of Presidents Washington through Taft, the public papers of Presidents Hoover through Obama, the weekly compilation of documents of Presidents Carter through George W. Bush, and the daily compilation of all documents of President Obama since he took office.  It also contains party platforms, transcriptions of presidential addresses and some of the debates and many more presidential documents than you could ever wish to research.

I didn’t intend to give you all that information when I started, but being a student of history I became so fascinated with it that I wanted to pass it on to those of you who are also interested in history.  It would be especially appropriate for students in their studies.

I chose to write on the subject of Executive Orders today because a major theme of President-Elect Donald Trump’s campaign has been his “promise” to rescind most, if not all, of the Executive Orders issued by President Obama.

It is not unusual for incoming presidents to do this to some extent.  President Obama revoked a series of executive orders issued by President George W. Bush including the order barring federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research, an order which bars funding for international groups that provide abortions, an order interpreting the Geneva Conventions with regard to the CIA’s detention of captured terrorists, and several Bush executive orders limiting the power of labor unions in dealing with federal contractors.

According to a column by Marc Thiessen in the Washington Post on November 14, some of President Obama’s executive actions will be easy to repeal such as his order to close Guantanamo Bay, the Paris Agreement on climate change that the President signed in September, Obama’s actions under Title IX denying due process to those accused of sexual assault and requiring schools to allow transgender students that do not match their biological gender.

It is the opinion of the aforementioned Washington Post column that the Clean Power Plan from the EPA can’t be undone with the stroke of Trump’s pen.  The EPA would have to formally revoke it which could lead to litigation.  

This could be just one of the reasons that having the power to appoint Supreme Court justices is important to the incoming president.  This would allow the Supreme Court to not only strike down illegal regulations but could set precedents that will be binding on future presidents as well.

Only time will tell how all of this will play out once President-Elect Trump is sworn in on January 20, 2017 but I think we can safely assume there are many changes to come.

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