Official Statement on Executive Orders
On his first day in office, as promised, President Trump signed 26 executive orders — a significant departure from past administrations. The sheer number and scope of orders signed on a single day is overwhelming. Governing by mandate is designed to disrupt and show force. It does not honor the dispersion of power and checks and balances so carefully built into our Constitution, and it violates historical norms that have ensured stability and consistency of expectation for the governed.
Although executive orders should be reserved for administrative directives or actual emergencies, in recent decades they have been regularly used by presidents of both parties to bypass deliberative legislative process and usurp Congressional authority. This has been widely recognized as problematic. But on Monday, President Trump went further, illegally claiming the ability to override the language of the Constitution. These executive orders both claim an authority he does not hold and create a sense of desperate urgency. Some of the orders initiate abrupt changes in both principle and procedure for government.
These executive orders are not simply theoretical or ceremonial; they will have an immediate and destabilizing impact on the lives of real people, creating fear, uncertainty, and pain, and potentially resulting in physical suffering. In many cases, they represent a significant moral and cultural shift in American priorities. At no point in our history have we granted one individual the uninhibited authority to do sweeping harm or to rewrite national priorities with the stroke of a pen.
In our system of government, the means matter as much as the ends. How we go about governing makes the United States both a global leader and reliably stable for our own citizens. The methodical exercise of shared power has been a source of tremendous stability, and the increased use of executive orders threatens this peace.
We are committed to supporting and sustaining the Constitution of the United States of America and the participatory democratic representation, deliberative processes, and checks and balances between the branches of government it established. Just one far-reaching executive order threatens that Constitutional balance. Multiple such orders, issued in a short time, are evidence of a deep disregard for the norms and values that have served our nation for centuries. These unilateral actions threaten Constitutional order, weaken our republic, and violate the premise of shared power and accountable governance.
We have a moral and ethical responsibility to speak out against the abuse of executive power and to collaborate as citizens to hold our elected officials accountable to the law.