Clinton's Executive Orders
March 8, 2001
For twenty years, President Jimmy Carter held the record for the most number of 11th hour executive orders. Outgoing presidents have been notorious for stepping up their activity in the Oval Office just before they have to turn out the lights. But Jimmy Carter set the bar so high it seemed unlikely that anyone would surpass his record. President Bill Clinton, however, did just that. His flurry of last-minute executive orders broke the Carter record that stood for twenty years.
During his two terms as president, Bill Clinton averaged about one executive order each week. By doing so, he was able to effectively legislate from the Oval Office. He wrote executive orders to set aside large tracts of land as national monuments. He wrote executive orders to restructure federalism. He wrote executive orders adding "sexual orientation" to laws on federal hiring. He wrote executive orders prohibiting federal contractors from hiring permanent striker replacements. In other words, he exercised a legislative function: he made laws.
In the past, presidents have used executive orders in order to move the executive branch of government in a particular direction. Presidents have used executive orders to close banks during the Depression, desegregate the armed forces, intern Japanese-Americans during World War II, protect endangered species, and ban assassination of foreign leaders. President Clinton merely took an existing executive privilege and vastly expanded it to allow him to make laws while sitting in the Oval Office.
And President Clinton followed in the tradition of President Carter in putting out a rash of executive orders during his last few months in office. Just on Jimmy Carter's last day in office alone, the Federal Register (a daily summation of new rules for the executive branch) was three times its normal size. The regulations drafted by President Carter and numerous lame-duck regulators earned the nickname: midnight regulations. By the time all the dust settled, it was estimated that President Carter added about 24,500 pages of last-minute regulations. President Clinton surpassed that record with over 30,000 pages of new regulations in the last 90 days...
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