Throughout the Obama era, conservatives had chastened the president for his profligate use of executive orders, which are edicts that require no approval from Congress.  Although the courts have the power to negate them, the former president’s critics rightly noted that one-person lawmaking undermines the spirit of our democracy by allowing a president to act like a monarch.

Of course, Democrats said the same thing about Barack Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. They stepped up their outrage at Donald Trump, who issued 220 executive orders in his four years in office. By that time, many conservatives were defending Trump’s profligacy – noting that many of the initial orders merely rolled back Obama’s orders.

Now, President Joe Biden is on a record-setting track when it comes to issuing such orders. In less than three months in office, Biden has issued 37 executive orders, putting him just behind the nation’s two biggest executive-order abusers (on an annual basis) – Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Republicans are understandably aghast, while Democrats say that – drum roll, please – Biden is only rolling back Trump’s bad edicts.

Biden has, with the stroke of a pen, removed Trump’s ban on travelers from Muslim-majority countries and halted funding on the border wall. However, most of the orders have nothing to do with reversing edicts and impose new rules – including requiring international visitors to have negative COVID-19 tests, expanding the Affordable Care Act, placing climate change at the center of security considerations, and establishing a White House Gender Policy Council.

The new president is now wading into gun-rights issues after announcing a series of executive actions. “The job of any president is to protect the American people, whether Congress acts or not,” Biden said at a press conference following a recent string of shootings. “I’m going to use all the resources at my disposal to keep the American people safe from gun violence.”

These actions will include directing the feds to draft limits on the purchase of so-called “ghost guns” – firearm kits that buyers assemble themselves and which lack serial numbers. He wants to limit access to “stabilizing braces,” which enable pistols to operate like rifles. Biden directed the feds to create guidance for “red flag” legislation, which lets police confiscate firearms from people they deem potentially dangerous.

Those proposals raise a variety of practical and constitutional concerns, which is why elected officials need to consider them in a proper manner through legislation. The actions will expand administrative regulations and threaten to tread on Second Amendment ground. All wide-ranging rule changes should be done legislatively and not by fiat.

The gun-control efforts highlight one extreme of executive rule-making – they allow the president to make substantive policy without the appropriate checks and balances. Meanwhile, Biden’s order creating a commission to analyze Supreme Court reforms shows another downside. They can end up allowing political showboating – something National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke rightly refers to this as “court-packing theater.”

Either way, the nation can use less lawmaking by executive edict. Perhaps we can’t go back to the days of George Washington, who issued only eight executive orders, but Americans should expect their presidents to use this power less often. Unfortunately, that won’t happen as long as partisans only criticize this phenomenon when the other side is abusing its authority.

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