Over the past week, a growing number of Republicans began sounding the alarm about the number and content of executive orders being issued by President Biden.
“The first week in office, what has Joe Biden done? He’s signed an executive order ending the Keystone pipeline, destroying 11,000 jobs,” Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, said in a Tuesday interview on Fox News.
“The scale of Joe Biden’s executive orders and their impact on Americans is stark,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said last week.
Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., blasted Biden for issuing “more executive fiats than anyone in such a short period of time, ever. More than Obama, more than Trump, more than anyone. Second, these aren’t just normal executive fiats, this is literally going down the wish list of the far left and checking all of them off.
Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., has been especially vocal about her opposition to Biden’s executive orders.
Biden has in fact been on a record-setting pace for executive orders, signing more than 40 of them in his first week in office. Most, however, were written to overturn those of his predecessor, Donald Trump. They have included an end to the travel ban from some majority-Muslim countries, a reversal in Trump’s immigrant enforcement policies, the rejoining of the Paris climate accord, the cancellation of the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline and an end to the policy of prohibiting transgender people from serving in the U.S. military.
After years of complaints that former President Barack Obama had used executive orders as an end run around a deadlocked Congress, Republicans were silent when Trump did the same thing. Not surprisingly, the pace of Trump’s executive orders increased after Democrats retook control of the House of Representatives, thereby blocking his prospects for passing legislation. By the time his term ended, Trump had signed 220 executive orders in a single term. Obama, by comparison, signed 276 over his two terms. From a historical perspective, both pale in comparison to the 3,721 issued by Franklin D. Roosevelt in his 12 years in office, though the nature of the orders, and the debate over whether they were better left to Congress to legislate, has also changed over time. Roosevelt’s most consequential initiatives, including Social Security and most New Deal programs, were enacted by legislation.
Source: Yahoo News
