Warber, Adam L. Executive Orders and the Modern Presidency: Legislating from the Oval Office.

• Author: Friedman, Barry D.
• Position: Book review

Warber, Adam L. Executive Orders and the Modern Presidency: Legislating from the Oval Office. Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2006. 175 pages. Cloth, $49.95.

Because the president of the United States is the chief manager of the national government's executive branch, he inevitably must communicate to his subordinates what he wants them to do. Such communication has another significant effect: It transmits to the subordinate official some measured portion of the president's authority, so that the official has permission to do something that he/she otherwise would not have the power to do. Although there may be any number of instruments by which the president may accomplish this communication, such as memoranda or white papers, a specific instrument known as the "executive order" has developed over time. Numerous scholars in political science and law have studied presidents' usage of this instrument in an attempt to understand what presidents use executive orders for, what presidents accomplish when they use them, what effect this usage has on presidential power, and what limitations may restrict the amount of advantage that this instrument may afford the president.

But to read this book by political scientist Adam L. Warber, one would be persuaded that the efforts of scholars in political science and law have been severely deficient. Throughout his book, Warber laments how ineffective and inattentive the studies in the fields of political science and law have been. This certainly comes as a surprise to this reviewer. As a graduate student at the University of Connecticut in 1983-84, I wrote a lengthy term paper about presidential executive orders, and was durably impressed by the literature that had been generated by the likes of James Hart (The Ordinance Making Powers of the President of the United States, 1925), Ruth P. Morgan (The President and Civil Rights: Policy-Making by Executive Order, 1970), and Sarah Slavin Schramm (a George Washington University student who had just completed her doctoral dissertation, The Politics of Executive Orders, in 1981). Since then, the literature has been supplemented by the works of Kenneth Mayer (With the Stroke of a Pen." Executive Orders and Presidential Power, 2001), Phillip J. Cooper (By Order of the President: The Use and Abuse of Executive Direct Action, 2002), and William G. Howell (Power Without Persuasion: The Politics of Direct Presidential Action, 2003). Yet, according to Warber...