Prescott Valley, AZ Correspondent — It expands when Congress won’t legislate, both parties use it, and the pattern has persisted long enough to be a shift rather than a workaround.
What’s different heading into January is that unified control removes the usual excuse. A party with the House, the Senate, and the presidency can legislate.
Whether it does is the test. If a unified government still governs by order, then gridlock was never the reason, and the reason was that legislating requires members to own a vote.
Wheeling, WV Correspondent — Presidents reach for these tools because legislating is slow, and once the tools prove useful the incentive compounds.
I’d add the appropriations version, which is where this actually bites in a place like mine. The government has been funded by continuing resolution for most of a decade, which means Congress isn’t writing the spending decisions either. An agency operating on last year’s number plus a formula is making the allocation.
That’s a delegation nobody voted for and it’s larger than any executive order.
Bismarck, ND Correspondent — Executive action has become the regular method and it looks permanent.
The court has changed the terms this year, though, and it cuts against the practice. Removing deference means an agency’s interpretation no longer carries the weight it did, which makes the executive route slower and more vulnerable at exactly the moment an administration wants to use it.
So we may get less of this by judicial accident rather than by congressional recovery.
Sheffield, Jamaica Correspondent — When both sides use executive power to bypass legislatures, the practice stops being temporary.
I’d offer the comparative caution, which is that this is the mechanism by which most democracies have degraded, and it never looks dramatic while it’s happening.
It is not a coup. It is a legislature that finds it more comfortable to complain than to decide, and an executive that fills the space because somebody has to. Each step is reasonable and the aggregate is a different system.
My region has examples in both directions. What distinguishes the recoveries is a legislature that decided at some point that it wanted the work back, and the work is unpleasant, which is why they mostly don’t.
Jacksonville, FL Correspondent — It’s becoming furniture, and polarization made the furniture tempting.
Lasting is what you get if findings and emergencies stay the easy route. Temporary is what you get if a statute puts clocks on them.
I liked speed on a real border emergency. I don’t like a throne the next name inherits, and the next name is always coming.
Tyler, Texas Correspondent — When the House can’t pass a sentence, the pen becomes the government.
Reverse it with votes and sunsets or live with it when you hate the pen.
I’d say the thing my side needs to hear in January. Everything done by order can be undone by order, which means nothing done that way is a victory that lasts past four years. If this coalition wants its program to survive, it has to legislate, and legislating means the Senate, and the Senate means sixty votes or a rules fight nobody wants to own.
Cheyenne, WY Correspondent — If it lasts years, it’s a law. Laws need a vote.
Vote or it dies. That’s how you keep it temporary.
Las Vegas, NV Correspondent — A property that runs on emergency staffing after the floor reopens isn’t in an emergency.
Write the death date. Habits without death dates become institutions.
Long Island, NY Correspondent — I draft under statutes agencies read as rooms, and the doctrinal ground shifted under all of this in June.
Two changes matter. Deference is gone, so an agency’s reading no longer wins by default. And the limitations period for challenging a rule now runs from when a plaintiff is injured rather than from when the rule issued, which means old regulations are newly challengeable.
Those together make the executive route considerably weaker than it was. An incoming administration planning to govern by rule is going to find that its rules are litigated faster and defended with less.
That’s not congressional recovery. It’s judicial constraint, and it produces the same result by a different route while leaving Congress exactly as idle.
Owatonna, MN Correspondent — The historical framing is that this has been growing since the 1930s under both parties and every generation has declared it a crisis.
What’s genuinely new is the reversal cycle. Major policy now flips at every change of administration — on emissions, on immigration, on labor rules, on student debt — which is a form of governance nobody designed and nobody defends.
Businesses and states can’t plan against it. That’s the cost, and it’s larger than the constitutional argument.
Knoxville, TN Correspondent — County government understands this. A sheriff issues a short order and the commission ratifies or it lapses.
Copy that upward and most of the argument resolves.
What I’d want in the next two years is one thing: a real appropriations process. Not a reform of executive power, just twelve bills passed on time. That would do more to restore the balance than any statute about emergencies, and it hasn’t happened since 1997.
Novi, MI Correspondent — The industrial complaint is instability rather than illegitimacy.
A rule I dislike that holds for a decade is easier to plan against than a rule I like that reverses in four years. We’re being asked to commit capital across administrations that disagree about the terms.
That’s why I want Congress to legislate even when I’d lose the vote. A statute is a fact. An order is a weather forecast.
