> > In the U.S. executive orders simply don't and can't have the force of law without the support of statutory law, not relative to civilians[0]. If you want a law, it needs to be passed as a statute by the appropriate legislature and must become law via all the usual mechanisms.
> This isn't true for many reasons including: the federal government controls a lot of what happens in the country indirectly and executive orders can decide what the law means (even if that meaning goes against what the law intended). Executive orders can for example suspend immigration. That absolutely affects civilians in an extremely practical way. More fundamentally, this kind of statement totally ignores how the legal system in the US works practically. Yes, there are laws, but laws are vague and must be interpreted. The federal government makes rules that interpret laws. These rules are what the law "is" practically. There is wide disagreement about what rules a particular law allows or doesn't allow. Executive orders can and do change these rules.
The President most definitely cannot promulgate Executive Orders that have the force of law without supporting statutory law from Congress. There is no argument about this in U.S. constitutional jurisprudence.
Presidential power is highest in military and foreign policy, and at its lowest in domestic policy. Immigration falls into foreign policy. Also, there's two plus centuries of statutes that delegate some Congressional powers to the Executive, such as tariff powers.
> > Also, the U.S. Constitution's requirement that State governments be (small-r) republican
> There is no such requirement. This was also not about federal constitutional law, it was about the constitution of Wisconsin.
This was addressed by other commenters.
> > This was a decision by a court, not a question of whether the people support their governments
> Only in the narrowest sense. It was a decision by a party, not a court. Republicans put their judges in power and the Republican judges made a decision. In that sense the US is absolutely unlike any other democracy in the world.
That is an outrageous take. The justices in question are elected, not nominated. (IIRC there's a nomination-then-election system in Wisconsin.)
The U.S. is a republic, which means it has stringent procedural rules. Some aspects of American governance are very democratic, some are less, and some are practically not -- that's how it was setup in 1787-1789, and all of that has remained essentially unchanged since then. None of this is new.