 Hold on, hold on. Okay, we're back, we're live. This is, we're calling this Trump Week. And we're initiating that show this week because we've had a week or two of President Trump. And so we see so much news. I mean, I read the New York Times in the first 20 articles every day, every night is about Trump and all the other national papers too, same thing. So we have Governor John Whitehead here and we have Carl Campania. Both of them are hosts on other shows here at Think Tech. We're gonna initiate this. Yeah, this is a very neutral panel. Yeah? Yeah? Yeah. We're not even gonna try to do that. I just thought I'd say it's true. And we're calling this, this is appropriate for this week, a new use for executive orders. Yeah. So Governor, you dealt with executive orders on the state level. What do you think of executive orders? Well, I think that they could be, they can be very useful because what an executive order ultimately is, is a memo from the commander-in-chief saying what the policy ought to be and what the people who work for him ought to be doing. So from time to time, you can do, as Obama did, for example, saying we got a lot of things on our plate that the Justice Department don't want you guys to prioritize and this is this administration's priority. We can do that but sometimes presidents and executives are getting accused of using the executive order as a way of bypassing legislation or probably more likely a regulation implementing a law that Congress or the legislature... Skipping the process. Yeah, it's a way of, you know, actually creating a law without going through the normal process. Yeah. This can be dangerous, huh? So there are no checks and balances on executive orders. Well, in a way, they are because it can be undone by the Congress in the sense that the Congress can say, pass a law saying that's not the way it ought to be. So a statute with Trump and executive order. But then again, you could get into a game and then have the executive just write something based on the new statute that undermines what it does. Carl, you had some numbers. You had some numbers of executive orders. Very interesting to see how that's going. Why don't you give us your numbers? Yeah, so I did a little bit of research and found that our very first president, executive orders began from year one of our great nation. So our very first president, George Washington, in his almost eight years in office, did, the number is about 10? About 10? We've had more than 10 in a week now. We've had technically seven. Oh, sorry. Seven executive orders in 12 days now is what we've had now. George Washington did 10 in eight years. Interestingly, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson had won each during their entire term. These numbers always stayed relatively low for a while until they started to jump up into the hundreds. And then eventually the biggest one at first, the first big jump was Theodore Roosevelt with 1,081 executive orders. He was going to get it done. He was going to get a lot done. And then the next big jump was Franklin Roosevelt to 3,522 executive orders. And those were the most at any, but that was over 12 years as well, but still. So no one else has come close to those numbers. There's one other had about 900 or so. Everyone else is 700, 600, 200, 300. And W Bush and all that. Exactly, you look at that. So from Nixon, Nixon through Reagan had in the 300s each, 350 or so, 370 or so executive orders. H.W. Bush had under 200. He was there for four years, 169, I believe. We get into Clinton, who was there for eight years, and he had 364 followed by W, who had 200 and W Bush, sorry, who had 296, I believe, and then Obama had 273. Most executive orders are just cleanup. I mean, they're really not important. In fact, being a devil's advocate, one of the presidents probably didn't have that many executive orders because he didn't care to put anything in writing was Andrew Jackson. He just did it. He just did it. So executive order is a way, in a sense, making it obvious. And what was interesting about Obama's use of the executive order was that he was dealing with a Congress that didn't want to take action on issues that were of national concern. And so President Obama then stated what was in effect, the administration's position on really existing law and existing situations that needed correction. Donald Trump is going someplace else with this, though. He is actually undoing, I mean, actually legislating new policy, completely new policy. In other words, what Obama did was that there was a law passed, the Affordable Care Act, and there were things in it that weren't administratively functioning like it should. And so an executive order would go out. Or in the case of Native Hawaiians, you had a situation where there was a pathway to federal recognition that was available for all Native people except Hawaiians, and which was done by regulation. So it was an administrative action that made that. And so he undid an administrative action. What George Bush is doing is he's coming right in and without any legislative authority, without any law that says that there ought to be a limitation on who enters the United States, his executive order is not interpreting something, it is creating it. But you know, Congress is cheering it. There's nothing in the Constitution about this. Oh, of course. About executive orders. Yeah, right. And we have lots of practice to look back on precedent, if you will, de facto precedent, but we don't have any particular legislation that deals with this. No. And they're a way of, you know, it's a powerful tool for the executive branch. On the state level, we have a number of other tools that are more likely to be used by the governor than an executive order. One is just to tell the people not to do it, you know, just directly. You just call a department head off and say, I don't want you to do it. But in the federal level, you're dealing with millions of employees, right? The other thing that the governor has is it just withholds funds. The president can't really do. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And all funders are starting with Congress. There used to be, you could, you could, and Nixon tried, and that all got corrected all the way up. But in Hawaii, the governor and the mayor both can, in a sense, undo the legislative process by just not doing it. But what about, you mentioned changing regulations. Isn't, in both federal and state levels, it's a, there's an Administrative Procedures Act, which guarantees a certain amount of transparency and process before. And that's what the executive order bypasses. Bypasses completely. Yeah, of course. Because you can throw it out for whatever you're doing. But what you're doing is you're saying, as for me and my administration, this is what we're gonna do. Yeah, that's troubling because, and this is my big question, is where are the checks and balances here? The oddity, that's why the right, for example, was so irritated in their mind about Obama. Because he would say something like, you know, we are not gonna send home people who were children when they came in through the United States. And some people thought he should have sent all of those people back. But the humanitarian thing to do was to do what he did. What the majority of Congress wanted to do was to do what he did. In fact, at that time, you had people like Machio Rubio leading the way on that. But it became politically advantageous to play up to people with more, you know, anti-immigration feelings. And Trump's just done it. He's just turned 100 years of history around. Well, I hear you're saying, Governor, is that although there haven't been as many, you know, executive orders as in past years, like with FDR, for example, the fact is that the presidents, just as a matter of sheer power, can go beyond legislation. They can go beyond regulation. And if they deem it appropriate politically or in terms of policy, they can flip the whole thing over and they have been doing that and Trump more than anyone else in the past. Well, Trump and more than anyone else is doing it in a very dictatorial manner. Yeah, dictatorial. See, the thing about an executive order is that it's effective as the people as the people and institutions are willing to obey it. Easy. Well, Trump's coming out of there and he's just saying, bam, bam, bam, bam. And the courts are going crazy. People are suing and so forth and so on. So it's created chaos. Yes. But what about, you know, before we get to the question of actual checks and balances, which we are seeing efforts at doing now, what about this change in the executive order process? Is it consistent with what the founding fathers wanted? Is this something that we should be worried about? Well, again, it's not in the Constitution. So there is no provision for that. It's just something that has been done starting with every one of them. Governor, you said the term dictatorial. Sure, dictatorial. And Herrington, that is dictator. You know, this is the problem. This is the problem for people like myself. And maybe for you too, Jay, I don't know. But it's been the conservative political position to say, since the days of FDR, that the federal Franklin Delano Roosevelt, forgetting Teddy and forgetting the early Republicans, but to take the position from that day forward, that the use of executive orders was an abuse of power, just in general, because the anticipation of executive orders was to say, okay, we're not gonna pick up the garbage on Wednesday. We're gonna pick it up on Thursday. That would be a kind of- No problem there. No problem. But when you start saying that certain types of policies had to be carried out without legislation and the like. So you see, but the problem we have is that the executive orders up until now have been used for things that brought in the democracy. Yes. That brought in the democracy. When Eisenhower wanted to send troops in to enforce Brown versus, you know- Board of Education. Board of Education. That was an executive order that did that. You see, and so it's been on the side of progress. Now we all of a sudden have a president who supposedly comes out of a conservative tradition, which means that if he really was conservative, he would not be issuing any executive orders. Using the executive order to go against broadening of the broadening of democracy. If he were here today. So I'm obviously, to me, he's like Hitler. If I- A lot of people- I'm calling him that, a lot of people. If he were here today, you know, he would say, look, I made these promises during my campaign. The people elected me, even though it's not really true. And therefore I am authorized. I have the authority of the people to do what I promised to do and I'm doing it by a gun. And that's the most important point, I think, of this whole situation. By the way, if he wants to come on the show, I'm here by inviting him- Me too. President, you can come on the show anytime. We'll have you here. The whole point of what he's doing right now, or at least the initial point of what he's doing right now, is he is living up to his campaign promises. He's trying to hit everything that he said from the wall to anti-regulations, to LGBT, right down to banning Muslims. All of that was his rhetoric for two years. And he feels he has authority, even though it goes beyond anything that executive orders were ever used for. Yeah, and what's happening in his base is jubilation. Yeah. Because there's probably people in his base at this moment anyway, jubilation. Probably people in his base felt like we do now when Obama was issuing executive orders. You know, like that was a dictator doing it, so now look at Donald's doing this. I happen to think, and so the image of our president is that he's going around just bumbling and doing crazy things and making bad policy. I don't know. The problem is we have not really explored the limits. And the limits are still being discovered here in the courts. And so after this break, I would like to cover how you put limits on a president's power under executive orders. And would you want to? And would you want to? We'll be right back. We're gonna cover that right after this break. Aloha, Kako. I'm Marcia Joyner, inviting you to navigate the journey with us. We are here every Wednesday morning at 11 a.m., and we really want you to be with us where we look at the options and choices of end of life care. Aloha. I'm Ethan Allen, host of Likeable Science here on Think Tech Hawaii. Every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m., you'll have a chance to come and listen and learn from scientists around the world. Scientists who talk about their work in meaningful, easy to understand ways. And you'll come to appreciate science as a wonderful way of thinking, way of knowing about the world. You'll learn interesting facts, interesting ideas. You'll be stimulated to think more. Please come join us every Friday afternoon at 2 p.m. here on Think Tech Hawaii for Likeable Science, with me, your host, Ethan Allen. Well, we're back with Governor John Wahey and Carl Campania on Trump Week, our new show, dealing with what the president does every week. And this week is, we're talking about our executive orders, a new use for executive orders, which we're seeing. And you mentioned during the break that even from George Washington on, people have never been, well, in those days they were conscious of these issues, maybe not so much now. Right, exactly. Leading up to the Revolutionary War period, there was so much more information out. There was the grassroots effort was a huge part of that movement. So more people at that time per capita were aware of civic engagement and not just civic engagement, but being engaged and being active and being a part of it, more aware of what the issues of the day were than any time before or since. Well, does that include now? I've got a lot of people who seem to be out in the street. Exactly. Right now it's starting to raise up. More and more people are trying to learn what is going on, why is that happening and how can I help impact that into what they perceive as a better direction? Is this a constitutional crisis? I think that, in a way, it is. I mean, right now we are going through a constitutional crisis in the sense that people are adjusting to what is a new situation. We have the Republican Party being the majority party in Congress. We have a Republican president who's just doing all of these things that essentially creating chaos. Now, the normal check, the normal check on the executive abusing power is Congress. But it's not, at least not at this moment in the majority party's best interest to check this president. So they're going along with him. So they're going along with him and it also is a kind of, I think, a kind of an indication of where the Congress is vis-a-vis the powers of the three branches of government. They sort of giving in to this thing. And it's making the president very powerful. Let's take a moment and talk about Sally Yates. She has been, until what, a couple of days ago. She was the Attorney General of the United States. She might have been temporary or a holdover, but she held the job. And she felt, as a matter based on her legal analysis and the legal analysis of her staff, of formidable staff, you know, those people are pretty good lawyers in the Department of Justice. She decided that his order about immigration was unconstitutional, as I recall. And so she said, I am not going to enforce it. My people are not going to enforce it. This department, one of the departments, you know, of the executive branch, we are not going to enforce it. That's my legal opinion. And he said, I don't care. I don't care about your legal opinion. You're fired. You're fired because of your legal opinion. I disagree. I'm not a lawyer and I don't have a legal staff like you do, but you're fired. This, to me, is a pretty significant kind of development in our government, don't you say? Well, first of all, it's bad practice. It's totally bad practice because of the mixed signals that you sent out to all of your employees. So what we have now is a situation where the boss is saying, I want you to do something and your lawyer just told you it was illegal. Now, if it is illegal and somebody has to be held responsible, it's going to be done with that individual. So every employee now has to choose between the possibility that they might get indicted or the possibility that they may get somehow penalized or fired for civil ordination or be fired. There's 900 people in the State Department are publicly opposed. You know what that does, though? That puts everybody on edge and makes everybody want to listen to what the president is doing. And you find everybody turning themselves either to be a yes man or they're quitting. So he is setting himself up to be that what, this is what it feels like, to be that fascist dictator. I believe this. And you know, there's a whole group of people who are saying Trump is crazy. And they may be right. Don't get me wrong. But I think that I come from the idea that the guy is diabolically clever. And he deliberately creates these crises, not for the immediate objective, but for the context that it creates that surrounds it. And the power. For example, he comes out and he says that there was fraud in the election. And the evidence of this is some quack that won't even show his evidence, right? But what it does is not, and everybody says, oh, this Donald's crazy. This is an ego thing. See, I come from a different perspective. I think he did it deliberately as a manipulator. Knowing what that opened the door to is not necessarily finding the fraud that he's claiming, but it opens the door to the kinds of election reforms the Republicans have been trying to do in the states that restrict voting rights. It's cover. However, in many states now, and it's growing, the gerrymandering is being thrown out. Well, you're hoping. But now that's the federal. It's what hasn't been happening. It's what hasn't happened. And so I want to raise that before we run out of time. So now there are lawsuits, and there will be more lawsuits, including by states. Two or three states have already indicated they're going to either file, they have filed, or will file lawsuits against his action. Now we have lawsuits pending in the federal courts, which may not be completely out of influence here, because some of them have been appointed by Republican presidents. Some of them could be in the future, be appointed by Trump himself. So the question is, when you go to court and you try to strike down these executive orders, who is representing the other side? If the ACLU goes or a state goes and they sue to set aside a given executive order, and the Department of Justice doesn't agree with it either, what happens? Well, it's going to be carried by the other side. I mean, it's going to be carried by the ACLU and the like. But who represents the United States? The Solicitor General and the United States position may be, more likely than not, the position of the president. Except if the Congress is involved, then it actually files its own amicus. But one of the scary things is that he just nominated what the person that potentially may be the deciding vote on some of these issues through the Supreme Court. And from what little I've seen about this particular nominee, he is extremely in tune with some of the positions that President Trump is taking. And he is being compared to being more conservative in the Justice Scalia. Which is hard to imagine. Well, not only hard to imagine, but the thing about Justice Scalia is as bad as he was, he was an intellectual. Yes. He actually liked dealing with the law. He had a perspective that I think belonged with Attila the Hun, but that's another story. But his perspective was taught out. That's not the same reputation for this gentleman. This gentleman may not. So can you make an argument? You could always. Not very often would he change his mind. But you always had the potential of a shot with Scalia. Because I remember we had a case just like that. Well, let me give you a scenario. So we have these cases, maybe a number of cases, on this set of executive orders and maybe others in the future. And they go to the federal court. There's a little confusion about exactly who is defending them and whether the person defending them agrees with the president or doesn't agree with them. OK, but it goes to court. And let's say that the federal court set aside these executive orders. At that point, it's up to the Solicitor General of the Department of Justice to appeal. And it winds up, I think, pretty quickly in the Supreme Court, the very court of this new appointment. And now we have the Supreme Court ruling directly, unfaust directly on the president's action. Wow, with a court that maybe with great sympathy for the president, too. Well, you'd have maybe. But what happens when you have a divided court? You see, it depends on what the order that the initial holding was. Because if the district court and the lower courts, let's say, go against the president's executive order and there's a divided court, and then the issue, as a result, is not taken up by the Supreme Court, then people like you and I and others who are extremely concerned have a chance. So it becomes very, very important in terms of the existence of these orders, given the fact that courts are now overturning them, that maybe that they shouldn't be a night justice on the court for a while. Well, I think Democrats are going to try to prevent that. But even still, remember, Chief Justice Roberts was the deciding vote when the lawsuit against Obamacare came to the Supreme Court and he issued it was legal. Yeah, I remember that. And they were unhappy about that. But that's why I say, you don't know. Their job is not to legislate. Their job is to interpret the legislation. Well, their job is going to be more complex going forward in this administration, don't you think? Absolutely. This scenario will play out. Absolutely. The last thing I would like to say is what he is doing, much like Governor was saying, what Trump, Bannon are doing is pushing the envelope of democracy from the perspective of how much can I get done? How far can I push this until I get pushed back? How much can I get away with? I think I got it. How much can I get away with? Exactly. And before anybody, before there's real pushback from anybody. The problem, and I leave you with this thought, the problem is that the executive order can be issued in a matter of minutes. As long as it takes to draft it and sign it. Bingo, it's done. Go on the evening news and advise the country. But see, that's another thing Trump has changed. Congress takes a long time. And the courts, they don't move so quick either. So he has a tremendous advantage in executive order. Well, I think so. In the past, by the way, to do an executive order took a long time because usually it was vetted through all the agencies. What Trump is doing is that he's actually just issuing it himself. Yes. And that is the major danger. They're writing it in the restroom and handing it to everybody with him signing it. That's all they're doing. That's all they're doing. Writing it in the restroom. I mean, how are closing statements then, gentlemen? What would you leave the public? What is in the restroom should stay in the restroom. Yes, and it should be flushed. Why bring it out and sign it? I wouldn't do that with you. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. I questioned this guy's judgment. Exactly. And I don't refer to him by name anymore. I refer to him as the Republican administration. He likes television. He should binge watch West Wing. Learn a few things. To learn a few things. Thank you, Governor. Good to see you. Carl Campania, both hosts and other shows here on Think Tech. It's been a great discussion.