About & Methodology
This page explains what this project is, where the data comes from, and — most importantly — exactly how the "constitutional sentiment" scoring works, so you can judge for yourself how much weight to put on it.
What this is
The Executive Orders Archive is an independent, open-source research portal indexing every available U.S. Presidential Executive Order, from George Washington to the present day. It is not affiliated with the United States government, the Federal Register, or any political party. Nothing on this site is legal advice.
Every metric you see — reading time, readability grade, sentiment score, plain-English summary — is generated automatically by software, not reviewed by a human editor or a constitutional scholar. Treat it as a starting point for research, not a final verdict.
Data sources
- Federal Register API — official presidential documents from 1994 to present, including Federal Register citations and the disposition notes ("Revoked by", "Amended by") behind each order's legal status. Orders before 1994 show a status only when a later order recorded revoking or amending them.
- The American Presidency Project (UCSB) — historical executive orders from 1789–1993.
- National Archives (NARA) — supplementary historical records.
- Wikimedia Commons — public-domain presidential portraits.
Reading time & readability grade
Reading time is a simple word-count estimate at 200 words per minute — the same rough heuristic used by most blogging platforms.
Flesch-Kincaid grade level is computed with the open-source
textstat
library over the first 10,000 characters of each order's text. It's a sentence-length and
syllable-count formula, not a legal complexity assessment — dense legal text scores "hard to
read" even when it's actually boilerplate.
The "constitutional sentiment" score
This is the site's most opinionated feature, so it deserves the most explanation. Each order is scanned for two sets of phrases:
Phrases like "faithfully execute," "pursuant to statute," "authorized by Congress," or "protecting civil liberties" — language that ties the order to existing law.
Phrases like "notwithstanding any other provision of law," "without a warrant," "commandeering state officials," or "suspend enforcement of" — language associated with bypassing Congress, the courts, or the states.
Each matched phrase carries a hand-assigned weight. The weighted totals are combined into a single compound score from -1.0 to +1.0, which is then bucketed into Constitutional Fidelity (≥ 0.08), Constitutional Friction / Overreach (≤ -0.08), or Constitutional Neutral (in between — the vast majority of routine administrative orders land here).
This is a keyword and pattern-matching heuristic, not a legal analysis, an AI model's judgment, or a claim about any president's motives. It cannot understand context, sarcasm, or an order that recites "protects civil liberties" while doing the opposite. Two orders with near-identical substance can score differently if one happens to use more of the matched phrases. Please read the actual order text — linked and quoted in full on every order page — rather than relying on the label alone.
The "Framers' Constitutional Analysis" callouts on each order page are generated the same way: template-based text assembled from the same pattern matches, not original scholarly commentary. Plain-English summaries and key directives quote the order's own operative sentences (skipping the standard "By the authority vested in me…" preamble), using section headings as directive titles where the order has them.
The Five Measurable "Constitutional Friction" Dimensions
To move beyond partisan rhetoric and audit executive power objectively against the Framers' design, every order in the archive is evaluated across five measurable constitutional dimensions:
Evaluates whether the directive reallocates congressional appropriations, imposes duties/tariffs without statutory authorization, or creates regulatory penalties reserved to Congress.
Distinguishes between routine ministerial administration (the duty to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed") and unilateral decrees invoking open-ended emergency powers.
Measures intrusion into police powers traditionally reserved to the States, including conditioning federal funding grants or commandeering state law enforcement.
Audits potential impacts on private contracts, domestic property takings, speech, or procedural due process protections guaranteed under the Bill of Rights.
Classifies the action into Zone 1 (Maximum Authority under congressional authorization), Zone 2 (Zone of Twilight during legislative silence), or Zone 3 (Lowest Ebb when acting in contravention of congressional will).
Corrections
This is an automated pipeline running against large public datasets, so errors — wrong dates, misattributed presidents, garbled OCR text from older documents — are expected. If you spot one, the underlying source is always linked from the "Original Source" button on each order page.
Supporting this project
The Executive Orders Archive is maintained as an open-access public resource with no advertisements, paid tracking, or paywalls. If you find this research archive valuable for historical, legal, or civic research, you can support our ongoing server hosting and data processing costs via Buy Me a Coffee, Ko-fi, or GitHub Sponsors.
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