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Americans are not accustomed to monarchy, nor should we be; we’re not a land built for hereditary rule the way Europe is. We might be the children of great monarchies, but we are republicans (with a lower-case “r”) at heart.
That said, it’s been extremely gratifying to see a Republican (with a capital “R”) flinging pens and issuing executive decrees with bold resoluteness. Donald Trump has accomplished more of the conservative agenda in a workweek than the vast conservative apparatus has achieved in fifty years.
Granted, executive orders are fragile, as they should be. They’re only as endurable for as long as the issuing president and/or his like-minded successors can maintain them, or get a recalcitrant Congress to pass an actual law (fat chance).
There are also limits to what they can do. Executive orders are not royal decrees—as much I’d like for them to be while my guy is in office—but they do have the force of law. Essentially, executive orders are instructions to the federal bureaucracy on how it is to enforce the laws Congress has passed.
The problem is that as Congress has delegated more authority to the executive branch’s bureaucracy, the more power those executive orders contain. Most presidents have largely left their bureaucracies to run themselves, in part because those bureaucracies are so elaborate, no single man can understand—or control—them. That lack of control became scarily apparent during the Obama years, and continued to hound President Trump during his first time.
President Obama wielded executive orders like a tyrant, due in part to his famously poor relationship with Congress—even when Democrats controlled it! Joe Biden—or, more likely, Joe Biden’s many handlers and puppeteers—used executive orders to weaponize the federal bureaucracy, entrenching all manner of Leftist pipe dreams into the functioning of the government and the execution of its laws.
President Trump has undone most of Biden’s legacy with the stroke of a pen. Even realizing that the real challenges of passing substantive legislation through Congress rests on the horizon, it is incredibly exciting and energizing to see President Trump fulfill one promise after the next, including enacting policies that are guaranteed to scare off huge chunks of the bloated, entitled, infantilized federal workforce, what I call the “professional useless people.”
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