POLI-TRICKS: Celebrities in Trouble! Everybody Hates Trump! Executive Orders!

POLI-TRICKS: Celebrities in Trouble! Everybody Hates Trump! Executive Orders!

In just a few weeks in office, President Trump has made striking use of his power to issue Executive Orders, using them to pave the way for the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, change the rules about federal regulations, and enact a controversial ban on admission to the U.S. for range of immigrants and refugees.

But historically, most executive orders have been issued with little fanfare, says Kenneth R. Mayer, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power. “Most real executive orders are pretty routine,” Mayer tells TIME. “In the 1930s and ’40s, Roosevelt had to use an executive order every time he wanted to exempt someone from mandatory retirement.”

But that doesn’t mean that unilateral executive action hasn’t had a major effect on the history of the United States.

Some of the most important unilateral executive action in American history, like George Washington’s Neutrality Proclamation and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, have not technically been executive orders. Mayer says that, for this reason, the number of orders a President issues is not a good measure of how he used unilateral power. Nevertheless, over the years the executive order has become a more controversial tool and more “prominent in the public psyche,” perhaps partly because its formality makes such orders easy to track.