WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden arrived at the White House ready to wield his pen to dismantle Donald Trump’s legacy and start promoting his own priorities.
Presidents Trump and Barack Obama relied on executive orders and other presidential guidelines to get some of their most controversial policies around a deadlocked Congress. But no president has stepped out of the gate as eager to use authority as Biden.
A primer on how presidential power works and its impact, often fleeting:
EXECUTIVE ORDERS: THE BASICS
An executive order is a signed, written and published directive from the president that manages the operations of the federal government.
Congress cannot just pass legislation to override an order, but it can use legislative actions – like cutting funds – to disrupt the president’s intentions. A new president can override a predecessor’s order by issuing another executive order, effectively canceling it. Biden did this repeatedly during his first days in office, while seeking to undermine Trump’s policies on a range of issues, including environmental regulations, immigration policies and the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
Presidents returning to George Washington issued thousands of directives to manage federal government business, according to data collected by the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Many are innocuous, like giving federal employees a break the day after Christmas. But executive orders – and his policy-making brethren, the proclamation and the political memorandum – can also be used by a president to promote political goals that the leader fails to pass through Congress.
KICKING BACK THE CLOCK
Time is of the essence for Biden, who has sworn as a candidate to act quickly to bring the coronavirus pandemic under control and undo what he considers the damage caused by Trump’s policies.
Many of Biden’s orders during his early days in office are directly related to the pandemic – a masked mandate on federal property, an executive order that provides guidance on safely reopening schools and provisional measures designed to increase food aid and protect job seekers against unemployment because of the virus.
But Biden also used executive action to try to set the clock back more than four years under Obama.
For example, Biden issued an order reversing a Trump-era Pentagon policy that largely banned trans people to serve in the army. Trump himself issued an order reversing an Obama action that laid the groundwork for transgender people to serve openly.
Biden also signed a memo to preserve the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, the Obama-era program that has protected from deportation hundreds of thousands of people who came to the US illegally as children since it was created in 2012 through an Obama directive. Trump issued his own executive order to undo the DACA in 2017.
Other orders aimed at fundamental policies of the latest government include a Biden guideline to reverse Trump’s ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries, executive action to return to the Paris climate agreement and a proclamation preventing the construction of his predecessor’s border wall.
BOTH SIDES DO; BOTH SIDES COMPLAIN
Certainly, the modern presidents of both parties have been major users of executive orders – and have been criticized by the opposition party. Bill Clinton had 364 orders in two terms, George W. Bush signed 291 in his eight years in office and Barack Obama issued 276. Trump in his only term signed 220 orders.
Not surprisingly, some Republicans complained about Biden’s initial reliance on executive orders. Senator Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee sneered in a tweet, “@POTUS, you can’t rule with a pen and a phone.”
Democrats, in general, received Biden’s orders as a necessary balm to deal with some of Trump’s most divisive policies. But the president also faced substantial criticism from both the left and the right about some of the first orders.
Republicans have complained that Biden is wasting taxpayer dollars by halting construction on the United States’ border wall, since signed construction-related contracts have yet to be paid. On the left, some racial justice and civil freedom groups were unimpressed by a series of orders that Biden issued in what White House officials said was an initial effort to address racial equity and injustice.
Biden sold himself to voters as the antidote Washington needs: the deeply experienced statesman who could bring bipartisan courtesy to Washington. As your presidency unfolds, over-reliance on executive orders can undermine that argument.
LIMITING THE ORDER OF A PRESIDENT
Courts and Congress can verify a president’s power to govern by executive decree.
Biden has seen his attempt to order a 100-day deportation moratorium paralyzed by a federal judge. US District Judge Drew Tipton concluded that the Biden administration failed “to provide any concrete and reasonable justification” for a pause in deportations and ordered a restraining order that prevented Biden’s order from taking effect.
President Harry Truman saw his attempt to confiscate steelmaking facilities in the midst of the Korean War thwarted by the United States Supreme Court, which held that the president had no authority to confiscate private property without Congressional authorization.
Obama tried to use executive authority to fulfill his campaign promise to close the US military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which over the years has kept many high profile international terrorism suspects. Congress prevented him from voting to block funding to pay for the transfer of prisoners from Guantánamo to the United States, including for medical treatment or prosecution.
HERE TODAY, I KNOW TOMORROW
The experiences of Trump and Obama underscore the fleeting nature of executive orders.
Both Trump and Obama have seen their most durable policy legacies come through Congressional legislation – for Trump, the 2017 tax cuts, and for Obama, his signature Affordable Care Act.
Trump tried hard, but failed to put pressure on a Republican-controlled Congress to repeal “Obamacare.” He, however, downplayed an important aspect of the health law when his own tax review legislation reduced the penalty for not having insurance to $ 0.
Now Trump is seeing many of his own orders, proclamations and memos fragmented by Biden. And Biden may well see many of his executive actions undone by whoever follows him into office.
Biden’s economic adviser, Brian Deese, acknowledged that some of the president’s executive actions – such as the directives that overhaul government calculations on food assistance for Americans living in poverty and another extension of moratoriums on evictions for Americans whose lives have been suspended for the pandemic – were only palliative, as the president tries to get bipartisan support for a $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus aid package.
In the end, Deese said, the orders, while useful, are pale substitutes for comprehensive legislative action passed by Congress.