A Warning About the Dangers of Executive Orders—From 40 Years Ago

The second term, Donald Trump, began with a flurry of executive orders, each more daring than the latter. Through them, he is openly trying not to manage the law, but by fiat. Their large volume and volume – in the absence of a resistance to Congress or a rapid abandonment of the courts – to put the very bases of the constitutional government to the test, because they were not after the civil war.

During his 160-year-old story, Nation Suddenly, he noted some executive orders and opposed others. The opinion of the magazine on such actions, as a rule, was focused on the merits of change of policy, not on larger constitutional issues on the limits of the presidential bodies. A 1951 Editorial Note, For Instance, Cheered An Order by President Harry Truman Seeking to Advance Racial Integration in the Defense Industry As “A Gesture of Support for Civil Rights. Truman Order Aimed at Stamping Out “Disloyalty” in the Executive Branch Was Descriped by Emergent Historian Henry Steele Commager as “An invitation to preciseely that Kind of Witch-Hunting which is a repugnant system”.

However, in the case of objection to the content of the executive orders, the presidential pretext that such power can abuse the unprofitable president, without respecting the constitutional restrictions on his power, were in full criminal criticism.

In the number of June 11, 1983 Issue NationJohn Shatuk, a lawyer of the US Union of Civil Liberties, wrote a story on the front page, the headline “Executive order: Cutting off freedom from Fiat”. For its first two and a half years, Shatuk noticed, Reagan administration used executive orders not only to create a new policy, as well as other administrations, but also to make the White House “actually the legislative branch of the government”. One of the functions of the Reagan executive orders, Shatuk noted, was “to provide aura legitimacy for presidential actions that may otherwise be challenged as illegal.” Openly claiming these actions in the presidential orders, the Reagan gave brilliance with the views of hidden internal operations against political opponents, which Nixon ordered secretly ten years earlier.

Shatuk was particularly concerned about the Reagan Order, which allowed the CIA to monitor the United States, a practice that was previously banned by law, and forcing federal agencies to announce more information as classified. Other orders have weakened the requirements for positive actions for the federal contractor of the Trump war against Dei-and demanded a birth clinic to inform parents of up to 18 years of age who sought reproductive assistance. Most of the anxious to Shatuka were executive actions that aimed at human rights protected within the first amendment, including the one that effectively censored the public official officials. Scottuk also feared that restrictions on observation surgery would be used against fans of freezing on testing and production of nuclear weapons.

While some topics of Reagan orders that Scottuk have announced are more relevant so far than our own, more question about how such actions can be used for tired, and then break up the pillars of the constitutional government today can not be more relevant. As Shatuk wrote, “this common scheme of the President’s legislation may eventually become a usurpation of power, at least as great as the one that happened during the imperial presidency ten years ago,” a reference to Nixon. According to him, the bewildered distribution of executive orders as a replacement of actual legislation can enable future presidents to equip the government and pursue its personal and political enemies. Already Reagan showed the way forward.

“(O) N on the eve of 1984,” Shatuk wrote, “a great communicator, a master of Dubel, tells the country that his executive orders are a law, and therefore the executive government is not lawless. The great brother could not claim the case more concisely.” And more useful for the current president, who went far beyond Reagan, which, if he thought, clearly declared his intention to manage an exclusively autocratic decree.