EXECUTIVE ORDERS ARE JUST RED MEAT FOR THE WINGS:

When President Obama relied heavily on executive orders to push through policies that had no chance in Congress, Republicans called him a dictator who abused his power and disregarded the Constitution. They even took him to court.

"We have an increasingly lawless presidency where he is actually doing the job of Congress, writing new policies and laws without going through Congress," Representative Paul D. Ryan, then the Budget Committee chairman, said in a 2014 television interview after Mr. Obama made clear in his State of the Union address that he would readily take unilateral action to get his way.

Now President Trump, at the start of his tenure, is relying heavily on executive actions not just to reverse Obama administration initiatives, but to enact new federal policies covering immigration, health care and other areas in ways that could be seen more as the province of the House and Senate. And he is doing that with clear Republican majorities in Congress.

The flurry of administration edicts flowing from the Trump White House puts some top Republicans in the awkward position of welcoming aggressive executive muscle flexing from a president of their own party after castigating Mr. Obama for using the same approach.

"Barack Obama's win rate before the Supreme Court is extremely low, lower than any president of this century," said Eric Posner, a law professor at the University of Chicago and an author of a new study on the subject.

On average, presidents win in the Supreme Court about two-thirds of the time. The Obama administration won just 50.5 percent of its cases. That record, the study said, "may be the worst since the Zachary Taylor administration," which began in 1849. [...]

But it is also part of a trend that started after the Reagan administration, which won 75 percent of the time. Each succeeding president did worse than the last. President George Bush won 70 percent of his cases, President Bill Clinton 63 percent and President George W. Bush 60 percent.

"It may be that the Obama administration is just the latest victim of a court that has gradually been losing confidence in the executive branch," the study concluded.

If that is so, President Trump may have no more success in the Supreme Court than his predecessor did.

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