By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--December 17, 2014
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Like executive orders, presidential memoranda don't require action by Congress. They have the same force of law as executive orders and often have consequences just as far-reaching. And some of the most significant actions of the Obama presidency have come not by executive order but by presidential memoranda. Obama has made prolific use of memoranda despite his own claims that he's used his executive power less than other presidents. "The truth is, even with all the actions I've taken this year, I'm issuing executive orders at the lowest rate in more than 100 years," Obama said in a speech in Austin last July. "So it's not clear how it is that Republicans didn't seem to mind when President Bush took more executive actions than I did." Obama has issued 195 executive orders as of Tuesday. Published alongside them in the Federal Register are 198 presidential memoranda — all of which carry the same legal force as executive orders.
He's already signed 33% more presidential memoranda in less than six years than Bush did in eight. He's also issued 45% more than the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who assertively used memoranda to signal what kinds of regulations he wanted federal agencies to adopt. Obama is not the first president to use memoranda to accomplish policy aims. But at this point in his presidency, he's the first to use them more often than executive orders.The most recent memoranda extends a statutory ban on oil exploration in Bristol Bay, Alaska. According to an act of Congress, the ban is supposed to expire in 2017. Obama doesn't want it to expire, so he simply wrote a memorandum saying it won't. This is how the guy operates. He thinks an act of Congress is only legitimate if it's to give him what he wants, and if Congress doesn't give him that, he thinks he is thereby endowed with additional powers to just grab it on his own. And as we see here, he doesn't even have the temerity to do it in an above-board way. While he issues executive orders about half the time, he uses the under-the-radar memorandum to grab a whole lot more power for himself. Let's see if the new Republican Congress really has the guts to stand up and stop this. I'll be pleasantly surprised if they do.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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