It is the Content, not the Number of Executive Orders that Matters

I just made the following comment to an article by Shadee Ashtari of the Huffington Post called Obama Has Issued Fewer Executive Orders Than Any President In Past 100 Years:

Counting the number of Executive Orders and claiming that all orders are justified by a given President if he has issued fewer than prior Presidents is complete nonsense. It is perfectly reasonable and consistent with the President's position as an executive to issue orders, so long as they do not interfere with the laws passed by Congress and signed by himself or a prior President. It is the content of the Executive Order that is all-important.

A very legitimate Executive Order would establish an interim policy for the enforcement of a law properly passed by Congress in which a real ambiguity was discovered while trying to implement it or in which an unanticipated situation arose which made enforcing the law clearly contrary to common sense. Upon issuing the Executive Order in such a case for an interim policy, the President should take the matter to Congress and ask Congress to resolve the ambiguity or treat with the circumstance with a new law. His interim policy should be carefully constructed not to infringe upon the constitutional powers of Congress by creating an effect Congress cannot readily re-direct with a new law.

Reagan's Executive Order on immigration was an attempt to implement a new law passed by Congress. That law had the unanticipated circumstance that the children of parents given amnesty by Congress were not themselves given amnesty. This was a truly unanticipated result tied largely to the Cuban refugee influx. George H. W. Bush was also trying to deal with unanticipated results of the fairly new immigration and naturalization law, though on a bigger scale. Obama, however, is doing by Executive Order what Congress under both George W. Bush and under Obama has refused to do. That refusal makes it clear that Obama is acting in opposition to many sessions of Congress and not just trying to deal with an ambiguity or unanticipated consequence of a recent law, which Congress has not yet had time to rectify. Congress has had time and has refused, which is it right to do under the Constitution. A President who defies that right is a despot.

There are even more common reasons for Executive Orders.  There are bound to be management issues in running the large executive branch which Congress simply does not wish to micromanage.  Examples might be how shall job performance evaluations be written up, what accounting method will be used to deal with a kind of situation, which federal land will be leased for oil and gas development next, etc.  One of the essential restrictions of a valid Executive Order is that only federal employees in the Executive Branch are required to take actions in response to the Executive Order.  The President cannot order any other American to do anything without the consent and authorization of Congress.

There is a better case, though a weak one, for Obama saying he will not use limited Homeland Security manpower and funding to deport some of the illegal aliens he has decided not to deport.  But, it is 100% clear that Obama is not empowered by the Constitution to have work permits issued to those he is not acting to deport.  That is very clearly a power that would reside only with Congress.

Obama Compares his Executive Experience with Palin's

Obama says, "Well, my understanding is that Governor Palin's town of Wasilla has, I think, 50 employees. We've got 2,500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe $12 million a year. You know, we have a budget of about three times that just for the month. So I think that our ability to manage large systems and to execute I think has been made clear over the last couple of years."

Can we count the many ways in which this is a very silly thing for the Obama messiah to say?

• Is Obama running for President against Gov. Sarah Palin or against Senator John McCain?
• If he is running against Gov. Sarah Palin, why is he comparing his executive experience against hers when she was the mayor of a small town, instead of when she was governor of a state?
• If he runs his election campaign poorly by spending huge sums of money and is still losing the election, then his management ability is clearly incompetent. This appears to be exactly what he is doing.
• He has managed a Senate Office staff for about 3 years, but his actual opponent has managed one about 10 times longer. No one thinks this is the equivalent of managing a private enterprise business, but there is some management expertise needed.
• Sarah Palin and her husband have managed a private fishing business for many years. This may not be the dream of a Harvard Law School graduate, but it sure beats the management experience of someone who gave contracts to political supporters to build and repair affordable housing no one could live in!

Obama has pointedly neglected the fact that Gov. Sarah Palin managed 17274 Alaska state employees in 2006. The state budget grew greatly in 2007 to $5.5 billion, so there was probably a large increase in the number of state employees in 2007. Is this because Obama is so stupid that he overlooked this? I doubt it. I think he thinks we are too stupid not to think of this. This points to his deeply entrenched elitism. We are all dumb peons who can be led by our noses so long as we are entranced by his sonorous tones and his own sense of absolute self-confidence. It also points to his total lack of a moral compass. If we were so stupid, he should not be so willing to take advantage of that stupidity to become our President. We should be asking for the leadership of a man of strong moral principle and we would need that all the more the more stupid we the people are.

Obama has also claimed that McCain has no more experience than he does. Does this mean that he is so unaware of his opponent's history that he does not know that Commander John McCain was the commanding officer of a jet squadron during the Vietnam war? Or does it mean that he is so unaware of the nature of the military services that he does not understand that the commanding officer of a unit is both a leader and a manager? Is he so ignorant that he is unaware that the expensive and complicated equipment of an aircraft squadron, with its many logistical needs, makes its management tasks greater than those of many other military units? Or once again, is Obama simply trying to take advantage of the ignorance of the voter in a most unsavory manner? Would this ignorance or this conniving immorality be that of a messiah?

Stupid people get and deserve leaders notable for their stupidity and immorality. If we do not want such leaders, it behooves us not to be stupid and ignorant!