It’s easier said than done:
It is hard to imagine a Republican President giving a pay cut to hundreds of thousands of minimum-wage workers. Along similar lines, an executive order banning federal contractors from discriminating against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender employees—which gay-rights groups and some congressional Democrats are pushing Obama to issue—probably wouldn’t be reversed by a future President (unless that President is Rand Paul, in which case all bets are off, and the only protection any workers will have is sharpened sticks). Some executive orders are best left in place, whatever a President might think of them. In 2001, President Bush sparked a backlash when he suspended a Clinton rule reducing the acceptable amount of arsenic in drinking water. We might like a little lemon in our water, maybe a little mandarin orange; arsenic, not so much. Bush eventually had to backtrack.
Public opinion isn’t the only obstacle. Some orders can’t be reversed without litigation or extensive public hearings. Others prompt changes in markets and behavior that are too complex, and become too ingrained, to unwind. Still others—for example, orders under the Antiquities Act, setting aside federal land as national monuments—can be undone only by an act of Congress.
The Dish 