Rantings

   House Speaker John Boehner complains that Congress won't pass any laws because his conservative colleagues can't trust President Barack Obama to enforce the legislation "as it is written."
   Wasn't it Republican  President Ronald Reagan, hero of the arch-conservatives, who issued "signing statements" as he approved legislation, specifying which sections of the law he would not bother to enforce?
    The latest rant from the Party of No is that Obama has become "lawless" because he has bypassed Congress through "executive orders" more often than any other President.
   Take a count: As of January 20, Obama has issued 168 executive orders. Reagan, in his two terms, not only openly ignored sections of legislation, but also issued 381 executive orders, more than twice as many as Obama. And Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, scored  291 executive orders, bypassing Congress. Richard M. Nixon racked up 346 executive orders. Dwight D. Eisenhower, 484. Herbert Hoover, 522. And Calvin Coolidge, 1,203. These numbers were compiled by the American Presidency Project.
   So what's this "more than anyone else" nonsense? Obama, a Democrat, has actually issued fewer executive orders than any president --  Republican or Democrat --since William McKinley. Exception: George H.W. Bush, but he served only one term, in which he issued 166 executive orders. And Gerald Ford, another one-term Republican, signed 169 executive orders.
   Granted, the all-time leader in racking up executive orders was Franklin D. Roosevelt, during the Great Depression and World War II years. FDR, a Democrat, signed 3,522 executive orders, earning him the accusation that he was trying to set up an "imperial presidency." Since then, however, the number of presidential executive orders has steadily declined.
   As to the need for executive orders, Obama said in his State of the Union message that if Congress won't act, he will. As for this Congress, heavily influenced by the Radical Righteous Tea Party crew, it has passed remarkably little legislation of any kind, reminiscent of Harry Truman's rant about a "do nothing" Congress.
   By comparison, that session -- in 1947-48 -- was a dynamo, passing 1,729 bills. The current Congress, in its first year, has passed just 58, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times. At this rate, it will be the least productive Congress since then.
   Yet Boehner defends the lack of congressional activity and points the blame to Obama. In effect, the GOP leader is saying there's no point in passing laws because conservatives don't trust the President, a Democrat, to enforce them
   That didn't seem to bother Republicans when Reagan openly specified which parts of which laws he was going to ignore.