Barack Obama is using Presidential memorandums to hide his Executive actions

  Detractors of the President claim that Barack Obama has overstepped his bounds on several occasions by issuing Executive Orders to bypass the Congress and thusly is expanding the power of the Presidency to never before seen levels, while  his supporters note the fact that Barack Obama has issued fewer Executive Orders than his predecessors to counter this claim.

  The latter is something that the President himself has pointed out when defending his use of the Executive Order:

 “The truth is, even with all the actions I’ve taken this year, I’m issuing executive orders at the lowest rate in more than 100 years,” Obama said in a speech in Austin last July. “So it’s not clear how it is that Republicans didn’t seem to mind when President Bush took more executive actions than I did.”

    However once again all is not what it seems when it comes to this President; he may be signing less Executive Orders than his predecessors however he is using memorandums to carry out parts of his agenda without  the hassle of going through the Congress and when you factor this in to the equation you come up with a President who is using Executive actions more than any other President since Harry Truman.

  Here is more:

President Obama has issued a form of executive action known as the presidential memorandum more often than any other president in history — using it to take unilateral action even as he has signed fewer executive orders.

When these two forms of directives are taken together, Obama is on track to take more high-level executive actions than any president since Harry Truman battled the “Do Nothing Congress” almost seven decades ago, according to a USA TODAY review of presidential documents.

He’s used presidential memoranda to make policy on gun control, immigration and labor regulations. Tuesday, he used a memorandum to declare Bristol Bay, Alaska, off-limits to oil and gas exploration.

Like executive orders, presidential memoranda don’t require action by Congress. They have the same force of law as executive orders and often have consequences just as far-reaching. And some of the most significant actions of the Obama presidency have come not by executive order but by presidential memoranda.

He’s already signed 33% more presidential memoranda in less than six years than Bush did in eight. He’s also issued 45% more than the last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, who assertively used memoranda to signal what kinds of regulations he wanted federal agencies to adopt.

Obama is not the first president to use memoranda to accomplish policy aims. But at this point in his presidency, he’s the first to use them more often than executive orders.

  So basically we are playing a game of semantics here but the results are the same.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about executive orders in his presidency, and of course by sheer numbers he’s had fewer than other presidents. So the White House and its defenders can say, ‘He can’t be abusing his executive authority; he’s hardly using any orders,” said Andrew Rudalevige, a presidency scholar at Bowdoin College. “But if you look at these other vehicles, he has been aggressive in his use of executive power.”

  He who controls the message controls the masses. The revolution will be complete when the language is perfect…