Simple Civics
Executive Orders
11/8/2021 | 2m 23sVideo has Closed Captions
U.S. Presidents since George Washington have used executive orders to move their agenda.
Executive orders are an important tool in any president's arsenal, allowing them to sidestep congress. But is this a good thing or a bad thing? From Lincoln to FDR, Dr. Terri Jett tells us how this process of lawmaking has created both inspiring and devastating results.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
Simple Civics is a local public television program presented by WFYI
Simple Civics
Executive Orders
11/8/2021 | 2m 23sVideo has Closed Captions
Executive orders are an important tool in any president's arsenal, allowing them to sidestep congress. But is this a good thing or a bad thing? From Lincoln to FDR, Dr. Terri Jett tells us how this process of lawmaking has created both inspiring and devastating results.
Problems playing video? | Closed Captioning Feedback
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship- It takes a number of steps for a bill to become a law, and sometimes partisan gridlock brings Congress to a standstill.
When the traffic becomes too much to bear, the president may have to take matters into their own hands.
The executive order is a signed directive from the president of the United States.
While Congress alone can create official US law, the president is in charge of how the federal government operates.
In this way, presidents can take a shortcut to enact their agenda without Congress' vote, and only a sitting US president can overturn a previous president's executive orders.
Almost every president in US history has issued at least one executive order.
Franklin Roosevelt issued the most by far with 3,721.
The only president who never issued one was William Henry Harrison, who died less than a month into his time in office.
The executive order is one of the most important tools in a president's arsenal, especially when they face a divided Congress or one that is unlikely to work with them.
But Congress can block the president by passing legislation that weakens the executive order, like removing funding from a given program.
Executive orders are often steeped in controversy because it is effectively the president sidestepping Congress, but they are not always a bad thing.
In fact, you may know one of these orders by a different name; Abraham Lincoln's emancipation proclamation was an executive order that officially freed all slaves in the Confederate states during the civil war and put the power of the US government behind the abolition movement.
In 1948, Harry Truman issued an executive order that led to the desegregation of the US military.
Sadly, there are plenty of executive orders that history does not look so kindly on, such as Franklin Roosevelt's order to relocate over 100,000 Japanese Americans to concentration camps during World War II.
So what do you think?
If you were a president and Congress wasn't helping you, would you issue a bunch of executive orders to get what you wanted or would you try and work it out diplomatically?
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Simple Civics is a local public television program presented by WFYI