It's hard to compromise when both sides don't trust each other.  It's even harder to compromise when you never really intended to reach an agreement with the other side.

        Gee, maybe that's why they don't trust you.  And perhaps that's why little is getting accomplished in Washington D.C. by our elected officials.

        One definition of "authority" is: "the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience."  That much power in the hands of one person or group without checks and balances is scary, which is why our forefathers saw fit to create three branches of government: executive, legislative and judicial.

        The day after the November 2014 elections, when voters returned a Republican majority to the Senate and House of Representatives, President Barack Obama said he was eager to find common ground with Republicans during the final two years of his presidency, but he swiftly defied their objections regarding his vision of immigration reform and vowed to bypass Congress and use his executive authority to change the nation's immigration system.

        Less than three weeks later he issued the executive order that would change the immigration system; the new Congress members hadn't even taken their seats yet.  No chance for a handshake, let alone a compromise.  Many will opine that there was no opportunity for agreement as 2015 drew near with the Republican takeover but, I guess we'll never really know.

        President Obama has signed fewer executive orders than his four predecessors.  But  President Obama has issued a form of executive action, known as the presidential memorandum, to take unilateral action more often than any other president in history. 

        Similar to executive orders, presidential memoranda don't require action by Congress and have the same force of law as executive orders and often have consequences just as far-reaching.

        Last year, the president announced that "even with all the actions I've taken this year, I'm using executive orders at the lowest rate in more than 100 years … so it's not clear how it is that Republicans didn't seem to mind when President Bush took more executive actions than I did."

        In reality, Obama has issued 195 executive orders as of the end of 2014.  He also issued 198 presidential memoranda which, again, carry the same legal force as executive orders.  All of this information can be found in the daily journal of the federal government, the Federal Register.

        In six years, Obama has signed 33 percent more presidential memoranda that Bush did in eight and 45 percent more than Clinton.  Obama is the first president to use presidential memoranda more often than executive orders.

        According to Gregory Korte of USA Today, when these two forms of directives are taken together, Obama is on track to take more high-level executive actions than any president since Harry Truman almost seven decades ago.

        Executive orders and memoranda can be timely and good or they can be quite controversial and create firestorms where compromise should be sought.

        The world is watching as two of the three branches of the United State government engage in a battle of trying to prove to each other just who's in charge.

        They forget that it's only a matter of time before the people get the final say.