If Joe Biden really wants to restore the norms of constitutional democracy, he will back off his plans to make extravagant use of executive actions when he first takes the presidency. The first, most foolish idea he should abandon is his plan to suspend all illegal-immigrant deportations for the first 100 days.

The framers of the Constitution never intended presidents to rule by fiat. The first six presidents issued just 18 official executive orders in the first 40 years of the republic. Most were either on basic administration matters or were “proclamations” such as George Washington’s call for a national day of thanksgiving. Of course, much of this executive reticence was abandoned with the growth in the past 100 years of the administrative state. Still, it is only in the past few decades that presidents have tested the limits of executive orders and other directives in ways that amounted to making new policy on their own rather than merely administering duly passed legislation.