Hi; I'm Ron Elving, and welcome to my office hours.
We're going to have to talk about executive
orders, because Donald Trump in his first
nine or 10 days in office issued so many of
them and made so much news with them.
So, let's start with the beginning.
There is no specific thing in the Constitution
about executive orders.
But the Constitution does talk about an executive
power in Article II, and right from George
Washington's start -- right out of the box
-- presidents have seen it necessary, in their
own terms, to issue orders that were something
other than laws.
Now, Congress doesn't pass that many laws,
actual laws, and in George Washington's day,
Congress didn't meet very often or for very long.
So if there was something important that needed
to go out from the president to give directives
to the federal government, George Washington
and every single president since then, save
one, has used executive orders to give directives
to federal employees to know 
what to do in certain situations.
The most famous executive order was issued
by Abraham Lincoln on Jan. 1, 1863,
and that was the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing
the slaves in all those territories that were
then occupied by Union troops.
Big deal, big order.
Now, what kind of force of law do executive
orders have?
They have the force of law until that point
that they are,
in some sense or another, overruled or suspended.
Either by a federal court, which we see a
lot — we've seen recently — or by Congress
stepping in and saying, “No no no no no.
We're going to pass a law and we're going
to supersede your executive order.”
Now, you'll also hear a couple other terms
used:
executive action, executive memorandum, etc.
An executive memorandum is pretty much the
same thing as an executive order.
(There are some differences in terms of where
it gets reported.
Federal Register and all that.)
An executive action can be something pretty
informal without any force of law.
For example, in January 2016, President Obama
issued a lot of executive actions
having to do with guns.
“Until we have a Congress that's in line
with the majority of Americans,
there are actions within my legal authority 
that we can take
to help reduce gun violence and save more lives.”
The president was not able to actually enforce
those as law, but was sending out directives
to federal agencies saying, “This is what
we'd like to be able to do.”
They were not the same thing as 
new laws restricting guns.
So that's the world of executive orders.
The champion all-time issuer of executive
orders was, no surprise, Franklin Roosevelt,
who served three full terms and issued — are
you ready?
— 3,522 executive orders.
So that's a chewy subject, but one you're
probably going to hear more and more about
in the months and years ahead.
So thanks for coming to my office hours.
I'm Ron Elving.
