You may have heard that Obama "signed 23 executive orders" this week. He didn't. That's just your mainstream media getting it wrong again.
And by the way, here's another pet peeve of mine. We have this strange fixation with numbers that don't mean anything. Politicians accuse their opponents of being responsible for X number of taxes or X number of tax hikes. I remember Michael Dukakis when he ran for president being accused of some horrifying number of tax hikes and most folks never knew that some of them were for a few pennies and only applied to a few people. If you're determined to vote against those who raise your taxes, you oughta be more militant about the guy who raised them once by three hundred bucks than the guy who raised them five times by twenty bucks. But a certain segment of our population only looks at the number of increases, not the amounts.
In the same sense, we have this hysteria that Barack Obama "signed 23 executive orders." Even if he had, doesn't it matter what's in those executive orders? Maybe some are trivial. Maybe some are things are things his detractors had proposed…and some were. But we have this Fox News narrative going that Obama is power-mad, dictatorial, Hitleresque, etc. So anything he does has to be spun as an outta-control Chief Exec.
If I were Obama, I think I'd start signing executive orders like crazy. Like when it was time for twenty-seven members of my staff to go to lunch, I'd sign twenty-seven executive orders that they go to lunch. I'd "sign" (i.e., have the autopen sign) hundreds a day and watch Sean Hannity go berserk screaming, "This Marxist president is now ordering government officials that they don't have to drink coffee on their coffee breaks if they don't want to." It wouldn't be good for the country but then nothing that's likely to be done in tandem with Congress these days does much good for the country. So the president might as well have a little fun.