Editorial: Setting policy by executive order is not effective government

Even if you like the changes President Joseph Biden is making through his flurry of executive orders this week, you have to be troubled by the comfort with which he appears to be issuing them.

True, nearly every one of the orders he has signed directly reflects a campaign promise, raising the presumption that his actions are aligned with the wishes of the people who elected him. But it's just as true that he won by only a little more than half the vote, meaning nearly half of Americans didn't necessarily want to see the massive policy changes on climate, immigration, the economy, the environment, the Muslim travel ban, health care and more that he is imposing with the stroke of a pen.

It's also just as true that the sweeping policies Biden is putting in place are ephemeral, active only until some new president comes along to change them. He is, after all, primarily just undoing the executive orders issued by President Donald Trump, many of which, by the way, were issued just to undo executive orders of President Barack Obama.

This is no way to govern.

The executive order is not some new policy tool thrust into the willing hands of recent presidents. Perhaps the most famous historical executive order was President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freeing enslaved persons in 1863. But the mechanism has become increasingly popular among presidents in recent years for a readily apparent reason. Congress has all but abdicated its responsibility to shape public policy.

Then-Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell famously said in an interview in 2010 that "the single most important thing we (Republicans) want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president," setting a goal that proved unachievable but invoking a tone that would define both parties over the next decade amid changes in chamber leadership. But even before McConnell's challenge, it had been the growing practice of the legislative branch of the government to make policy not on reasonable accommodations between the majority and minority parties but on the brute force of the majority party's numerical advantage.

Or, failing that, the blunt, temporary power of the president's pen.

Republicans in the U.S. House and Senate are rightly concerned about the ease with which President Biden is upending the work of his predecessor. Perhaps if they had been as concerned about the work of his predecessor and had worked with Democrats to shape legislative policy that most of America can support rather than allowing a president to dictate policy that satisfies only barely more than half of America, they would not have so much to complain about today.

But let's be clear on this, too: In the same interview in which he threw down the one-term gauntlet before Obama, McConnell also said this: "If President Obama ... (is) willing to meet us halfway on some of the biggest issues, it's not inappropriate for us to do business with him ... I don't want the president to fail; I want him to change."

There's plenty of room to debate McConnell's sincerity in that latter claim, but the heart of his point is important. Governing effectively for the long term requires accommodation by and cooperation of both the executive and the legislative branches - as well as both major political parties.

This has not been the modus operandi of either branch or either party for many years, and the result is an increasingly divided nation whose policies seesaw with every election. Democrats may be elated with the policy changes Biden has set in motion and Republicans may be offended by them, but if either party wants to see effective long-term change, they both need to undertake a massive shift in how they work with each other.

And if President Biden really wants the policies he is ordering to stick and really wants to build a tone of unity in government, he'll start easing up on the executive orders and try to engage Republicans to do business with him and his party.