POLI-TRICKS: Celebrities in Trouble! Everybody Hates Trump! Executive Orders!

POLI-TRICKS: Celebrities in Trouble! Everybody Hates Trump!
Executive Orders! In just a few weeks in office, President Trump
has made striking use of his power to issue Executive
Orders, using them to pave the way for the repeal of the
Affordable Care Act, change the rules about federal
regulations, and enact a controversial ban on admission
to the U.S. for range of immigrants and refugees. But historically,
most executive orders have been issued with little fanfare, says
Kenneth R. Mayer, a professor of political science at the
University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of With the Stroke
of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power. “Most real
executive orders are pretty routine,” Mayer tells TIME. “In the
1930s and ’40s, Roosevelt had to use an executive order every time
he wanted to exempt someone from mandatory retirement.” But that
doesn’t mean that unilateral executive action hasn’t had a major
effect on the history of the United States. Some of the most
important unilateral executive action in American history, like
George Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation and Abraham
Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, have not technically
been executive orders. Mayer says that, for this reason, the number
of orders a President issues is not a good measure of how he used
unilateral power. Nevertheless, over the years the executive order
has become a more controversial tool and more “prominent in the
public psyche,” perhaps partly because its formality makes such
orders easy to track.