![]() courts have overturned only two orders: Truman’s order on steel mills, and President Clinton’s 1995 order to preclude the federal government from contracting with firms that had strike-breakers on their payroll. On the positive side, in a famous 1957 order that was respectful of rights, Dwight Eisenhower decreed an end to racial segregation in America’s public schools. These were clearly rights-violating orders. Harry Truman issued an order to seize and nationalize all steel mills in America, during a labor strike in 1952. history, FDR issued one that forcibly transferred Japanese-Americans and German-Americans to internment camps during World War II. If Nixon was dangerously imperial, was JFK positively monarchical?Īmong the more famous (or infamous) executive orders in U.S. Yet those same Democrats failed to note that JFK, in his short tenure at the White House, issued 22% more orders (71 p.a.) than did Nixon. Nixon issued an average of 58 orders p.a. In the 1970s the Democrats may have been more justified to complain of Richard Nixon and his “imperial presidency” (indeed, that was the title of a 1973 book by Harvard history professor and JFK acolyte Arthur Schlesinger), because Mr. Obama has issued fewer edicts (so far) than his predecessors does not thereby justify his decrees, but it does allow us to question the unrestrained hyperbole we’ve been hearing from the right-hand side of the American political spectrum. ![]() Others can easily dig into the details of orders, which are available on line at The American Presidency Project. Some have been more tyrannical and rights-violating than others (see more, below), while most have been merely administrative and wholly innocuous. Of course, a mere quantification of executive orders can’t constitute a full-fledged study of the topic, since it does not address the actual content or effects of such orders. Obama has averaged 37 executive orders p.a., which is below the long-term average of 44 p.a., and lower also than the rate of five GOP presidents – including Gerald Ford (84 p.a.), Dwight Eisenhower (60 p.a.), Richard Nixon (58 p.a.), Ronald Reagan (48 p.a.), and George H.W. Harry Truman had the highest rate of decree issuance (113 p.a.), while Warren Harding had the lowest rate (just 2 p.a.). The average for all twenty presidents is 44 per annum (p.a.), with Democrats averaging 59 p.a.
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