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The president of the United States is not a king. Joe Biden seems to have forgotten that.
We used to teach our kids that the Constitution separates powers between Congress, which makes the laws, and the president, who carries them out.
The courts are there to resolve disputes over what the laws mean. The Founding Fathers designed this system, as John Adams wrote in the Massachusetts constitution of 1780, “to the end it may be a government of laws, and not of men.”
Presidents can give orders to the people who work for them in the executive branch, but they aren’t supposed to make laws. Our presidents have been forgetting this in recent years.
While the problem is bipartisan, the presidencies of Biden and Barack Obama have been the worst offenders in using presidential executive orders and administrative agency regulations to write new laws.
Just counting executive orders — Biden has issued 79 of them so far — doesn’t really capture the problem. There is nothing wrong with executive orders that explain presidential policies so the executive branch can follow them. And some of the worst mischief comes from orders issued by the alphabet soup of regulatory agencies and cabinet departments.
The real problem is when presidential administrations try to make sweeping new rules on issues of domestic politics that ought to be decided by the lawmakers.
