ATMOSPHERE - On February 19, 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066. In this one-page decree, the president used his authority as the commander-in-chief to authorize the U.S. military to "exclude" 122,000 Japanese Americans — more than half of them U.S. citizens — from their homes and businesses and relocate them to isolated and desolate internment camps [source: Our Documents]. A month later, Congress passed Public Law 503, making it a federal offense to disobey the president's executive order.
An executive order, also known as a proclamation, is a directive handed down directly from a president or governor (the executive branch of government) without input from the legislative or judicial branches. Executive orders can only be given to federal or state agencies, not to citizens, although citizens are indirectly affected by them.
Executive orders have been used by every American president since George Washington to lead the nation through times of war, to respond to natural disasters and economic crises, to encourage or discourage regulation by federal agencies, to promote civil rights, or in the case of the Japanese internment camps, to revoke civil rights. Executive orders can also be used by governors to direct state agencies, often in response to emergencies, but also to promote the governor's own regulatory and social policies.
Governors use similar interpretations of their state constitutions to justify the legality of executive orders.
Critics of executive orders argue that these unilateral decrees undermine our trusted system of checks and balances, giving undue authority to the executive branch. For that reason, executive orders are considered a form of "executive legislation" [source: Contrubis]. In recent years, both presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump have wielded executive orders as political weapons to push through controversial policies or regulations without Congressional or judicial oversight. Executive orders can be overruled by the courts or nullified by legislators after the fact, but until then they carry the full weight of federal and state law.
To better understand the controversial and colorful history of executive orders in the United States, let's start at the beginning, with George Washington himself.
Merryman's lawyers appealed for his legal right to appear in court to determine if he was being lawfully held, a concept known as habeas corpus. Through an executive order, Lincoln called for a suspension of Merryman's right to habeas corpus, something that only Congress could do in times of rebellion or invasion. Lincoln explained his actions to Congress, which later passed the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act of 1863, officially giving the president the power that Lincoln had assumed.
While Washington and Lincoln issued only eight and 48 executive orders respectively, other presidents issued thousands [source: The American Presidency Project]. Teddy Roosevelt was the first to break the 1,000 mark, thanks to his "stewardship" theory of executive power, in which the president should do everything that isn't explicitly forbidden by the Constitution to actively direct the affairs of the nation.
World War I and World War II brought dramatic increases in the use of executive orders, as did the years spanning the Great Depression. Franklin D. Roosevelt issued 3,721 executive orders during his prolonged presidency [source: The American Presidency Project]. His very first was on Inauguration Day, when he ordered the closure of all banks for four days to begin restructuring the financial system under the New Deal.[HSW]