Moreover as Andrew Rudalevige at the Washington Post makes clear, the entire issue of executive orders amounts to misdirection. The serious complaint is that Obama is abusing executive powers (which he is) not that he’s abusing executive orders (which he may or may not be). Obama is surely capable of defending himself intelligently. But he and his choir always revert to the mode that his opponents aren’t merely wrong, but that they are laughable idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Anyway, the whole post is worth reading. Here’s the beginning:

There are plenty of reasons for the House not to sue the President (see here, here, here, and here). Not on the list, though: that President Obama has barely used his executive powers.

This claim was made most recently by the White House itself, when senior adviser Dan Pfeiffer spoke to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Sunday’s “This Week.” The threat of impeachment is credible, Pfeiffer said, since the GOP is so crazed that “the House [took] an unprecedented step to sue the President of the United States … even though he is issuing executive orders at the lowest rate in 100 years.”  Or as Sally Kohn put it in a CNN op-ed, after listing executive order totals for Obama, TR, Eisenhower, Reagan, and Bush, “House Republicans are using taxpayer dollars to fund a lawsuit against a President who has literally done not only what every president before him has done but has done it less often . . .”

To be pedantic (I think I’m supposed to say first that I hate to be pedantic, but I’m a professor, and that would be a lie), this is both true and hugely misleading.  It is true that President Obama has issued fewer executive orders both in absolute terms, and on an order-per-year basis, than most of his recent or even recent-ish predecessors. It’s also true that executive orders can matter greatly, as with Obama’s expansion of protections for the employees of federal contractors.

And yet to equate executive orders (a formal type of presidential directive) with executive powers, as the White House and its allies seek to do, is to misdirect — to hope that the hand will be quicker than the eye. As Philip Bump has put it, the fuss is about executive actions more broadly. While Obama issued only 20 executive orders in 2013 (the lowest single-year total in more than a century), that same year he issued 41 presidential memoranda to the heads of departments and agencies, along with nine additional presidential “determinations” designed to serve as the basis for bureaucratic behavior.