Every president's executive actions, in one chart

Every president's executive actions, in one chart

President Obama's announcement on Thursday of his intention to begin changing the immigration process through executive action caused quite an uproar, but in terms of his rate of use of executive orders, Obama is not particularly exceptional.

While Republican critics are right that Democratic presidents have used executive orders more frequently in the last century, Obama's use rate of 33.6 actions per year so far is about on par with George W. Bush and nineteenth century Presidents Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison. See the full chart beliw, via statistician Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight. --Bonnie Kristian

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Bonnie Kristian

Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.