Can executive orders ever be permanent or can they always be revoked by the next president/supreme court?

7 comments

1. Yes, the courts can review and if they violate Constitution, they can be overturned. Presidents can modify and cancel previous EO as well

2. They can always be revoked by either the president who issued them or a later one. And they can’t violate the Constitution or federal law, so they can always be challenged in court.

3. They can be revoked by the next president, or (somewhat more indirectly) Congress or the Supreme Court.

   The President is the chief of the executive branch, so when Congress makes a law saying “we should do X”, it goes to the president and the executive departments under him to see to it that X gets done. Essentially, executive orders are instructions to the departments and agencies that report to the president on *how* they should go about doing X.

   But since the executive branch’s authority to do X ultimately has to come from some law passed by the legislature requiring it, Congress can render an executive order moot by repealing that law or passing a new one saying “no, nevermind, don’t do X after all”. And those laws can in turn be ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, who would then order the executive branch not to enforce them. And once a new president assumes the powers of chief executive, all those standing executive orders continue to exist at their own discretion since, well, they’re not *laws* per se and are inventions of the office of the president, so if the president doesn’t want to keep the executive order going, they can just… not.

4. >I also wondered if there are executive orders still in effect that you think should be overturned.

   Trump’s executive order to the ATF to reclassify bump stocks as machine guns. He legislated from the office with that EO and the ATF legislated from the squad car with their following of that order.

   Bump stocks are not machine guns under any definition set by Congress and the President does not possess the authority to unilaterally decide that a clear definition fits something it clearly doesn’t fit. If the US wants to regulate bump stocks as machine guns, they need to be added to the NFA by Congress, not the President and most certainly not the ATF.

5. no, the closest thing to permanent in American law is things that are written into the Constitution. And even those can be overturned by Amendments (like prohibition).

   In the case of EOs, they can be repealed by following presidents or by the supreme court if they violate federal law or the Constitution.

6. You can think of it as there being three tiers of federal laws: executive orders, congressional laws, and constitutional amendments. They get progressively harder to repeal or change. It requires another amendment to overrule the constitution but congress can (and has) undo an executive order or even just a different EO.

7. Nothing in our government is permanent. That’s by design. A government that cannot reform will eventually be overthrown.