Boston Globe: “Given the frenetic pace of executive orders President Trump has issued — purporting to do everything from changing election laws and citizenship eligibility to freezing foreign aid and dismantling federal agencies — a casual observer might think Trump has the powers of a king. But he doesn’t, even if he likes to pretend he does. The easiest way to understand what executive orders are is with an explanation of what they are not: laws. Only Congress can make laws at the federal level. That, of course, doesn’t render the president powerless — far from it. The Constitution gives the president all necessary power to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” That starts from the very way legislation becomes law: with the president’s signature. Congress can also pass laws that give the president additional powers. That is one reason why the president has such broad authority over immigration policy, for example. Title 8 of the US Code gives the White House the power “to suspend the entry of all aliens or any class of aliens” if the president “finds that the entry of any aliens or of any class of aliens into the United States would be detrimental to the interests of the United States.” And the president can use executive orders to carry out that power. Which brings us to what executive orders are. In simple terms, an executive order is a directive from the president about how the federal government should operate. Think of it as a management memo. It doesn’t create new power, it just clarifies what the president would like done using existing power. That doesn’t mean such orders can’t have an enormous impact. The Emancipation Proclamation was an executive order. While President Lincoln’s edict could not end slavery — only an amendment of the Constitution could — it did dramatically impact the Civil War by allowing Black men to enlist to fight for the Union with the promise of freedom, and it helped frame the conflict as a battle for freedom that ultimately helped change the trajectory of American history. Such sweeping measures used to be rare. But since President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s tenure, during which he issued 3,721 orders, their use has grown in both size and scope. But no president has pushed, and it seems exceeded, the limits as far as Trump has. Even Roosevelt only managed to issue 99 in his first 100 days in office. Trump beat that pace this term by a full month. But Trump is also pushing the limits of his power. Walter Olson, a Cato Institute senior fellow, wrote in a blog post that while he may agree with some of the substance of Trump’s attempts to change federal election laws, that’s not the point. “New laws should be passed by lawmakers, not by decree, and across much of the order Trump is trying to usurp power not rightfully his,” Olson correctly notes. Which brings us to another check meant to keep presidential power from spinning out of democratic control: the courts. Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 ruling in Marbury v. Madison, the courts have had the power to review executive actions. At first it was implied, but then Justice Hugo Black laid it out in black and white in the 1952 opinion in Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer: “[T]he Constitution is neither silent nor equivocal about who shall make laws which the President is to execute.” But even unlawful executive orders can have enormous consequences — and that is what gives them power. For example, the law and the Constitution prohibit deportations without due process, but tell that to the Maryland resident who sits in a Salvadoran prison, separated from his wife, his disabled child, and the home he has made in America since 2011. “We treat Trump’s executive orders as laws not because he has the legal authority to do it, but because he has the raw physical power to do it,” Elie Mystal, a legal analyst, author, and fellow at Type Media Center, told me. “So I can tell you all you want that I deserve due process and I cannot be abducted off the street, but if Trump decides that anybody who speaks out against him can be picked up off the street, guess what happens? People get picked up off the street. It doesn’t matter if it’s legal.”…