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…