Law & (Executive) Order: Governing in the Modern Age

If there’s a shortage of pens in Washington, D.C., blame the White House. A handful of days into Donald Trump’s second term, the twice-elected president has inked more autographs than Alex Ovechkin. After signing almost triple the executive orders (26) of his predecessor on day one, the 78-year-old hasn’t let his foot off the gas for a second. In a flurry that’s left even The New York Times scrambling to keep up, Trump is flooding the zone with actions on everything from immigration to gender — a strategy that isn’t just frustrating Democrats, it’s radically rewriting American policy. The question is: for how long?

The modern presidency has been uniquely defined by executive orders — a strategy that Barack Obama made famous in 2011 with his slogan “We can’t wait.” And while the orders are nothing new (four presidents signed more than 1,000 of them), Obama’s open circumvention of Congress was. “Where I can act on my own without Congress,” he said, “I’m going to do so.” The idea didn’t sit well with members, especially those of the Republican persuasion, who were quick to point out that a president can’t “go it alone.” “We’re going to have to remind him we do have a Constitution, and the Congress writes laws,” then-Speaker John Boehner fired back.

Obama was undeterred. “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” he insisted at his first Cabinet meeting of 2014. It would be, he promised, a “year of action.”

That action, it turned out, wasn’t without consequences. For one, the 44th president ran smack dab into the U.S. Supreme Court, who decided — on more than one occasion — to rein in the unchecked power Obama declared for himself. For another, the changes didn’t last. They were, as Joe Biden’s have been, erased as soon as Trump took office, which has become the predictable routine for every partisan flip of the executive office.

Of course, it’s easy to understand why executive orders are so enticing. They put instant wins on the board. It’s immediate policy gratification — unlike Congress, whose ability to get anything of substance done has been crippled by partisan and even intra-party fights. Even when Republicans or Democrats do control both chambers, it doesn’t necessarily translate into rapid-fire legislative successes.

Take this week, for instance. While Trump is radically overhauling the executive branch and the federal workforce, the GOP is in Florida bickering over how to implement the president’s agenda — if they even showed up at all. Some refused to even attend, a not-so-promising sign of the tempers boiling over in the powder keg known as the House majority. “Sadly enough, we have people sitting at home complaining about the meeting on Twitter, and they’re the ones who’d rather complain, attack, argue, than be part of the solution,” a frustrated Rep. Greg Murphy (R-N.C.) told Fox News. “We know who they are. We just have to deal with it.”

Is it any wonder that chief executives are tempted to leave the chaos of Congress behind? As George Washington University’s Casey Burgat and Georgetown University’s Matt Glassman wrote in National Affairs (and The Washington Post harkened back to last week), the presidency “‘changes more abruptly than other governing institutions.’ A ‘strong disruptive incentive’ grows stronger as presidents, impatiently disdaining Congress as an impediment to the flowering of their reputations, increasingly resort to achieving changes unilaterally, by executive orders.”

It’s not as if the Founders didn’t make allowances for it. In Federalist Paper 72, Alexander Hamilton writes that a president is well within his authority “To reverse and undo what has been done by a predecessor, is very often considered by a successor as the best proof he can give of his own capacity and desert.”

The trouble is, executive orders were never meant to be a form of replacement governing. A nation controlled by EOs is an unstable place, as Family Research Council President Tony Perkins pointed out on Tuesday’s “Washington Watch.” “We’re elated [and] excited about most of the policies [Trump has put in place by executive order].” A majority of those actions, he explained, “are within the framework of the law and mov[e] us back to the rule of law and [get] our government back to where it should be. But we saw four years ago how quickly that turned with the Biden administration coming in. And so, I’m concerned long term about our country where we see this back and forth, this ideological shift every four years. That’s unsustainable.”

Congressman Keith Self (R-Texas) agreed. “This is Congress’s role, because we need to codify into law a lot of these policies. … As you say, the next president could undo a lot of what Trump is doing now. The only way around that is to codify it into law, so that we don’t have competing EOs every four years.”

Perkins asked if that had been discussed in the Republican caucus. “Have you and your colleagues been [talking about] how we can take these orders and basically preserve them going forward by making them statutory?” Self replied that the House has been meeting about that, especially with the chairmen of various committees. “I think we’ll probably get a long way toward that once we get past the reconciliation [bills].”

“I hope so,” the FRC president said, because we “can’t sustain” the extreme back and forth. It’s not good for our country, and it doesn’t strengthen us on the international scene either.” We need to be “anchored in truth,” he added, “and lay a solid foundation for this country.”

That said, Trump’s breakneck pace on executive orders is having a significant impact in at least two ways: serving as momentum for key legislation and reinforcing existing laws.

Shortly after the president released his guidance protecting children from chemical and surgical mutilation Tuesday, Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) reintroduced his Protecting Our Kids from Child Abuse Act that would bar funding from any facility that carries out these transitions and also allow victims of these procedures to sue. “Our children should no longer suffer from irreversible and dangerous child mutilation procedures, which the Biden administration enabled and promoted,” the senator said in a statement before citing the White House’s own move. “I welcome President Trump’s strong action to reverse this child abuse and look forward to working with his administration to advance legislation that protects our kids.”

On the flip side, the laws that Biden unlawfully ignored are getting some much-deserved attention. Over at Health and Human Services (HHS), the acting secretary is demanding a full evaluation of the agency’s policies and programs to make sure they’re all in line with the pro-life Hyde Amendment after the president’s order calling on agencies to stop using taxpayer dollars to fund abortion.

“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, through the Office for Civil Rights, is tasked with enforcement of many of our nation’s laws that protect the fundamental and unalienable rights of conscience and religious exercise,” Dorothy Fink said in the announcement. “It shall be a priority of the Department to strengthen enforcement of these laws.” In a fact sheet circulated by the White House over the weekend, the president’s team reminds staff, “Congress has enacted the Hyde Amendment and a series of additional laws to protect taxpayers from being forced to pay for abortion. Contrary to this longstanding commonsense policy, the previous administration embedded federal funding of elective abortion in a wide variety of government programs.” That ends now, Fink declared.

So yes, executive orders are important, but they’ll never take the place of duly-enacted laws. As experience has taught both sides, congressional victories are much harder to overturn (and much harder to accomplish, unfortunately). It’s past time for the House and Senate to get back to the hard work of legislating — even in this tense, wafer-thin majority — and match the urgency of Trump.

As FRC’s Quena Gonzalez told The Washington Stand, “President Trump came into office with a mandate that he’s determined to fulfill. He’s issued dozens of executive orders, reversing Joe Biden’s priorities and returning common sense on life, biology, immigration, and gender experimentation on kids,” but, he warned, “those wins could be reversed on day one of the next Democratic presidency.”

“America is tired of whiplash every time a different party takes the White House. Congress needs to act. From defunding abortion providers like Planned Parenthood (which receives hundreds of millions of taxpayer funds each year) to protecting kids from a lifetime of medical experimentation if they express temporary discomfort with their sex, to defending people who believe in one-man, one-woman marriage and preventing targeted prosecutions of peaceful pro-life protestors, Americans are not tired of winning,” Gonzalez insisted. “We’re tired of every election being a life-and-death struggle between common sense and lunacy, between liberty and tyranny.”

For now, he emphasized, “President Trump’s re-election has given America a reprieve. Whether that reprieve is temporary or has more permanent and lasting implications for the future of our country rests, in large part, with Congress. It is time for our elected representatives to step up.”

AUTHOR

Suzanne Bowdey

Suzanne Bowdey serves as editorial director and senior writer at The Washington Stand.

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EDITORS NOTE: This Washington Stand column is republished with permission. All rights reserved. ©2025 Family Research Council.


The Washington Stand is Family Research Council’s outlet for news and commentary from a biblical worldview. The Washington Stand is based in Washington, D.C. and is published by FRC, whose mission is to advance faith, family, and freedom in public policy and the culture from a biblical worldview. We invite you to stand with us by partnering with FRC.

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