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Comment by vog | Hacker News Reader

> The next president then reversed this.

Just out of curiosity: This is very uncommon in modern democracies, isn't it?

In most European countries (and maybe also in the US?) each newly elected government shows enough respect for the previous government by not reversing laws established just 1-3 years ago. They usually either concentrate on different topics, or restrict themselves to refinements and corrections of existing laws.

And there's some good reason for that: You don't want a country's set of laws switching between two versions every 4-5 years without making any progress.

However, since that taboo has been broken by now, maybe the next US president would have the courage to do the same with everything the current president did?

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These were executive orders, not legislation. It is quite common for new administrations to rescind or override executive orders of previous administrations. EOs usually direct an administration to enforce department rules a certain way and a new administration is within their right to interpret them another way. Enacting legislation that specifically spells out how certain rules are to be carried out is the best way to make them concrete. Nowadays it is very difficult to enact any legislation let alone remove it.

> These were executive orders, not legislation. It is quite common for new administrations to rescind or override executive orders of previous administrations.

OTOH, the US having both a weak party system and a separation of power system makes it so that, to return to the upthread question about modern democracies, it does a lot more through executive orders than many modern democracies, which often have a strong-parties parliamentary system or a weaker Presidency, so that the executive has either less ability or less motivation to issue executive orders for matters that might be directly addresses by legislation.

> it does a lot more through executive orders than many modern democracies

Obama did a lot more through executive orders than his predecessors, in large part due to Congress obstructing all policy much more than its predecessors. IIRC, at a certain point he turned to executive orders to implement policy the best he could.

Also, most other modern democracies use parliamentary systems, in which the executive always has the majority in the legislature. In those cases, executive orders are less needed because the legislature and executive are much more likely to agree.

this wasn't a law, though, it was an executive order, which is just a decision by the president on how to run the executive branch.

in this case, it only applied to companies that had contracts with the federal government for more than $1 million. basically, Obama ordered his departments to stop doing business with companies that had certain arbitration clauses. Trump removed this restriction.

i would expect a ton of Trump's executive orders to be overturned if the next president is a Democrat.

it's much harder and less likely to repeal an actual law passed by Congress.

The problem is that an executive order isn't exactly a 'law'. It's the president ordering the executive branch about what to do, so it has no inherent permanence.

I wouldn't expect most executive orders to stay the same here if the president changes parties. But that's a statement about what I expect, not about how things ought to be.

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