The flurry of Presidential Executive Orders attracted plenty of data-based checks in the media. The bad propaganda, rollbacks, and a dip in the President’s approval rating may have been avoided if the US Constitution mandated the Whitehouse to do similar checks before initiating the Executive Orders.
Mandating data-based checks on executive orders ensures that decisions made by the President are rooted in evidence and have a clear, justifiable basis. Data-based checks would ensure that executive orders are issued only after they are scrutinized on their merits, impact, and alignment with the public interest. These checks help prevent orders from being issued on personally or politically motivated priorities or unsubstantiated claims.
One of the recent Presidential priorities has been Generative AI (GenAI). My mentee, a high school senior, and I recently presented a study using GenAI on the correlation of sexual assault crime rates with statutory stringency at a reputed conference. GenAI infrastructure, like Large Language Models (LLMs), can help with data-based checks for executive orders.
LLMs like ChatGPT can analyze statutes, case law, and public opinion pieces like this one to assess the legality and alignment of an executive order quickly. By parsing through large volumes of legal documents, AI can identify precedents, flag conflicts, and offer predictions on the potential legal outcomes of a given executive order. GenAI could predict the effects of a policy across various sectors of governance.
Checks and balances are a core principle of the functioning of a democratic government. It is not in the interest of the people at any time for the executive orders of one person to bypass the legislative process. Favoring narrow interests is not aligned with the spirit of democracy. We need a constitutional provision to prevent the executive from undermining or overriding Congress’s role in lawmaking. Life can become unimaginably difficult if the Police Department Sherriff, for instance, starts issuing far-reaching orders, regardless of the law of the land, based on personal agendas, whims, and vendettas. As was once popularly said, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Democracy is finally answerable to the people, their representatives, and the judiciary in the short term. The executive branch of the government, as the name indicates and as enunciated in Article II of the constitution, is meant to execute the orders passed by the legislative wing.
An interim executive order may be necessary when the legislature is not in session or for other urgent reasons, but that needs to be ratified by the Congress within a specific time or it lapses. This may not have been incorporated into the Presidential form of government, but it is never too late to change something for good. In a true democracy, both legislative chambers should have the power to review, amend, or oppose executive actions.
The economy grows as more and more people join its core echelons. People are the most important economic resources at all times. When countries not as developed as the USA are willing to take even criminals deported from the USA, it is unfortunate that we are unable to utilize even better-qualified people to our advantage.
Data will prove that lack of manpower is bound to increase Americans' costs. For instance, before the pandemic, deep cleaning my home using Amazon service, which is no longer available now, cost $127.99. Cleaning teams are now demanding $500 for the same service. The current onslaught on immigration may raise that price tag much further.
Even minor regulations often go through a public comment period. Surprisingly, executive orders that have a wide-reaching impact are allowed to be enforced unilaterally. The current pandemonium at the helm of affairs is indeed a wake-up call for change.
Vishnu S. Pendyala, Ph.D., MBA (Finance), teaches machine learning and other data science courses at San Jose State University and is a Public Voices Fellow of The OpEd Project. Opinions expressed are his own and not those of his employer or any other entity that he is affiliated with.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.