Where does the president get the power to issue executive orders?

0:05One of the most important things that the President does, perhaps his single most important power, is reflected in the Take Care Clause of Article II, which provides that the President shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. The President is not making the laws, but he is tasked with the job of executing them, of carrying them into force.

0:26Executive orders are one of the ways through which the president announces how he is going to execute the laws. It's basically the President saying, I am taking these steps. I am opening up this trade possibility with a foreign country. I am policing this particular type of immigration. I am taking these steps to mitigate environmental pollution based on my interpretation of statutes that I am tasked with the constitutional job of enforcing. Executive orders have always been around, but of course, they used to be far more infrequent. One of the things that has happened is, as the federal government has gotten bigger, as Congress has passed more statutes, as Congress has delegated more and more authority

1:14to the President and his subordinates in the Executive Branch, executive orders have proliferated, both because there are just more contexts in which guidance from the Executive Branch is either necessary or at least helpful in fleshing out what these laws required, how they're going to be enforced, and because, especially in our contemporary political moment, when Congress is perhaps gripped with a little more dysfunction than we've seen at prior moments in history, there's almost more of an imperative for presidents, whether they're Republicans or Democrats, to try to fill gaps that Congress is, for political reasons, unable to fill, hence, the proliferation of executive orders and the controversies surrounding them