Presidential Executive Orders over Days in Office [OC]
imgur.com/a/d1elE
imgur.comPosted Apr 12, 2018, 10:06 AM UTC
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That's super interesting. It also adds to my general dislike of FDR.
People have been afraid of Trump not wanting to give up power at the end of his term, same with Obama before him. FDR actually didn't want to give up the presidency. I never realized he signed three times as many executive orders as any other modern president.
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So the President (FDR) took office during THEE great depression, with a congress that had just shifted from Republican to Democrat control (100 seats shifting sides). The Democrats were trying to figure out how to get us out of the depression without breaking the bank, and fought FDR on a great deal of his proposals to just put people to work anyway they could.
FDR signing executive orders to start things moving and creating new agencies to deal with MAJOR works projects while Congress was trying to unravel what happened and what could be done about turning things around. People just wanted work, be paid, be able to afford a roof, food, and clothes for their families. FDR got it going. This continued as it was working and people loved him for it. He would go on the radio (new media of it's time) and let people know what he was doing, give them a version of the "stiff upper lip" speech, how we needed to help each other, and that we were doing some amazing engineering projects to get people back to work.
He kept going with it during WW II, but had congresses approval on most anything he wanted, hence the short spike at around the 3300 day mark and tapering off after.
The sheer size and scope of everything he introduced, executive orders or bills sent to congress (yes he would use executive orders but then send bills to congress to get long term approval) is amazing in and of itself. Yes, I understand it was not just him writing the orders/bills, but what other president has come close to the amount of change they influenced on our great nation?
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Why do you have such a dislike for FDR? He is definitely one of my favorite presidents.
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I’m with you on this one. It’s difficult to say whether or not FDRs actions helped America out of the depression or extended it. It is not difficult to see how it sets a dangerous precedent about the authority of the presidency. FDR seemed to harbor significant doubt in the US political systems which is really scary. Fortunately term limits were set immediately after to solidify the notion that the president is not an emperor.
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I started working on this over a year ago, and I was inspired to come back to it after seeing this post by u/cavedave. The script I wrote to gather the data and generate the graphs can be found here, and all data was gathered from the Federal Register’s Executive Orders Disposition Tables