Quote:Considering the sitting Congress during his entire tenure has been focused on undermining his every move and essentially being the least helpful/productive Congress any sitting president has ever had, you'd think he would have used it more.

Executive orders don't exist to ensure a President gets his way. They're designed--actually, they're not designed at all, more on that later--to facilitate the operations of the government itself rather than putting minute policies through Congress. The way Obama and Bush used them patently violated that ages-old understanding, and probably the Constitution itself.

 

Although it's hard to violate the Constitution when it doesn't specify anything, right? The concept of an "executive order" is not presented anywhere in the Constitution, and it's instead a slight override of the checks and balances system allowed by all parties as an administrative function. There's a pretty wide gulf between issuing an executive order that allows an office within the executive branch to add funding for a special project and issuing one that is Constitutionally questionable because the President knows it would never make it through Congress. The first check and balance on Presidential decisions is Congress. By removing that hurdle, he's taken his only check and balance to the court system, which could take years to push this through. During that time, the Second Amendment rights of Americans are being infringed upon.

 

IMO, what Obama did is nothing short of illegal. I agree with the sentiment behind it, maybe even the actions the order puts forward, but giving the President the ability to run roughshod over the Constitution when he doesn't feel like waiting for Congress to do its thing is an extremely dangerous precedent to set.

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