Barack Obama’s embrace of lawmaking through executive order—“I’ve got a pen to take executive actions where Congress won’t,” as he once put it—was a degradation of the constitutional order and the rule of law. His executive orders accelerated after Republicans won control of the House of Representatives in 2010, and Obama presented them as a prescription for a “deadlocked” Congress (known otherwise as divided government). But his remedy only made government sicker, creating more chaos and disorder by way of the legal challenges that followed his orders and the threat that a future president could just as easily reverse everything he did.

Nowhere was this more acute than in the case of illegal aliens who arrived here as children. Frustrated by a stalemate on Capitol Hill in 2012, Obama issued an executive branch memorandum to defer action on deporting these young people—after having repeatedly claimed that he could not do so. The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program was challenged in court and became a political issue in the 2016 election when Donald Trump campaigned on repealing it. His administration did exactly that last year.