Cass Sunstein

The president can't get it to happen.

So any exercise of authority by the president, this is going to have some exceptions, but broadly speaking, needs to have legislative permission.

So you can't have a Department of Transportation regulating road safety or an Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulating Occupational Safety and Health unless Congress has told you to.

You have to ask Congress for permission.

Recent presidents and not so recent presidents have occasionally transgressed that limitation on authority.

Nonetheless, the constitutional restriction is clear.

Article 1, Section 1.

Amazing.

That's how it starts.

People's judgments about who has power often are framed as judgments that are enduring about like institutions and who can be trusted.

But they're often, in fact, judgments about the person who would exercise the power.

So under President Obama, I noticed this is something I don't know whether to be amused by or aghast, that under President Obama, a lot of President Obama's critics were complaining about all the executive orders he issued.

And because I was there, I spent a lot of time on it.

And he actually didn't issue an unusually high number of executive orders.

There's a national debate, so many executive orders from Obama, with the Democrats saying, not so many, not so bad, and Obama's critics saying he's gone crazy with all the executive orders.

And then there was a flurry, this is kind of ancient history now, of complaints that President Obama had created czars.

And that was, you know, we don't have czars in the United States.

Now, this was all institutional objection to the president, A, issuing executive orders and B, having czars.

President Trump has issued a very large number of executive orders.

And the people who criticize President Obama for a much smaller number of executive orders don't seem alarmed at the Trump executive orders and vice versa.