Ten To TossThe top Bush executive orders that Obama should scrap immediately. By Emily Bazelon and Chris Wilson

The presidency comes with a superpowered pen for signing executive orders. Without negotiating with Congress to pass a law, or even going through the notice-and-comment period that precedes a new federal rule, the president can change the music that federal agencies dance to. He's the executive, and it's his executive branch.

What, then, is the worst of the damage President Bush has caused all on his own? In putting together a top (or bottom) 10 list from the Bush administration's 262 EOs, we sifted through some familiar targets, such as his faith-based initiative and diversion of funds from stem-cell research. We also realize that some of the Bush moments we rue didn't come in the form of an executive order. The recent bid to force family-planning clinics to certify that their employees won't have to assist with any procedure they find objectionable, for example, took the form of a federal rule. So did the administration's decisions to open up new swaths of public land to logging and mining and to raise the allowable level of mercury emissions.

We'd like to see those rules repealed, too, but we decided to stick with EOs for this list because of their consoling simplicity. If they can be conjured by a stroke of the pen, they can also quickly be made to vanish—presidents show little reluctance to excise their predecessors' dictums. Here are our picks for the nine orders most deserving of the presidential eraser come January, plus a tenth suggested by readers....