WASHINGTON (AP) – Modern American presidents have found that a good way to get started in office quickly is to issue decrees like a former king.
With a pen as a scepter, they “proclaim”. They “order”, “direct”, “revoke” and “declare”, translating the commandments into royal language extracted from the remote past. President Joe Biden is flooding the area with them, achieving sweeping changes in national politics that he would not have hoped to obtain quickly from Congress, if he would.
However, easy arrival can also mean an easy start. As President Donald Trump found out with his harsh and often ill-fated executive actions, courts can be quick to overthrow them. Congress can effectively annul them, and at most, they are only valid until an opposing president takes control and steps out in another direction again.
Can transsexual troops have a life in the armed forces? Not openly under Trump. Under Biden, yes, they can. Below who comes next, who knows?
For now, however, the heavy government is seeing changes in the speed of light.
In Biden’s opening days, he put the U.S. back into the Paris climate deal, ended Trump’s travel restrictions on some Muslim-majority countries, froze the construction of Trump’s border wall, protected immigrants who were brought in illegally to the US as children and reversed Trump’s reversal in energy efficiency and pollution standards. This is just a sample.
Altogether, Biden brought a transformation in both tone and substance in the early days of his presidency. After the loud and never questioning Trump, almost everyone would do it.
Twitter is a dead zone now to see what’s on a president’s mind right now. Things that are being heard from the Oval Office that are strange to our ears recently: “Correct me if I’m wrong” “How can I say this politely?” “I spoke badly.” The use of a mask is mandatory on federal property and encouraged everywhere; meanwhile, the jokes came from the government’s top public health scientists.
But Biden’s expressions of humility and his common courtesies go to some extent. When it comes to dismantling a predecessor’s legacy with the stroke of a pen and the words “I have defined my hand here”, Biden got off to a fierce start and, like many before him, testing the limits of what a president can do by decree .
“A lot of what he did was unravel what Trump did,” said Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on presidential powers and executive actions. “Virtually all presidents push the envelope and do things that expand the scope of executive authority.”
President Barack Obama struck a multinational nuclear deal with Iran and shaped and adhered to the Paris deal without the signature of Congress, using presidents’ recognized authority to make international deals, but leaving these movements vulnerable without the consent of lawmakers. Trump withdrew the US from both.
Unable to get Congress to pass immigration legislation, Obama unilaterally protected young immigrants from deportation, leaving nothing in the law to ensure their protection would last.
For most of his first year in office, until his tax cuts were approved in late 2017, Trump did not record major legislative achievements, despite having Republican control of Congress at the time. He also didn’t get big victories in law after budget deals. But he was relentless with executive actions.
“Every president seeks these opportunities,” said Mayer. “What Trump did was take the brakes off and do things that previous presidents hadn’t done. He was in love with his own powers. He was extraordinarily aggressive and did not respect the normative limits of what presidents should do.
“A lot of that was really careless,” he added. “Shockingly incompetent.”
Trump’s orders to restrict the entry of some Muslim countries were repeatedly blocked by federal judges until a weakened version was passed in the Supreme Court. He declared a national emergency when there was no nationally recognized one on the southern border, which allowed him to redirect some money already approved by Congress, but for other purposes, to his border wall.
Then there were the federal lands and waters that previous presidents acted to protect from development. Trump was watching them.
“For more than 100 years, it was the accepted meaning of declaring national monuments that it was a one-way door,” said Mayer. “You couldn’t cancel the declaration of a national monument.” But that custom was broken in 2017 with Trump’s executive action to review or reduce the protection status of vast hectares of national monument land.
Biden moved to counter that with his own request. But the implementation of its executive actions for several months in preparation was not entirely smooth.
In Texas, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order preventing the government from imposing a 100-day deportation moratorium on most deportations, it determined that the new government had provided “no concrete and reasonable justification” for this.
Biden recognized the limits of his initial course of unilateralism as he prepared to face Congress on the relief of the pandemic and its ambitious legislative agenda. Merely governing by “executive decree,” he said, “would get us almost nowhere.”
Republicans snarled at Biden’s busy pen, expressing the standard complaint about presidential hype that comes from any party that is out of power in the White House.
Biden was a little irritated by the resistance when he was asked whether Congress could require him to send the pandemic aid package in parts, rather than as a whole. “Nobody demands that I do anything,” he said with a monarchic flourish.
Biden burst through the gate with several dozen executive actions. It remains to be seen whether he will overcome the unilateralism of Trump, who has signed an average of 55 executive orders a year, the maximum in a single term since Jimmy Carter, which averaged 80 per year.
On this front, the king among presidents is Franklin Roosevelt, who signed 307 a year on average and combined this activism with imposing legislation that leads the country through depression and war.
If executive action is usually transient, legislation is anything but.
Although there is no permanence in anything that Washington does, hard-won legislation usually takes deep roots. So it was with “Obamacare”, the law that Republicans vowed to overthrow from the beginning, but they never could.
Trump’s first executive order, on the day of his inauguration, was directed directly to unravel the Affordable Care Act. But the presidential decree could not take away what Congress had ordered, and neither could the repeated efforts of Republican lawmakers to vote on it until it did not exist.
Biden also had an executive order on this matter. On Thursday, he ordered the law’s health insurance markets to reopen for a special enrollment window., giving uninsured the chance to find coverage in a violent pandemic after the Trump administration refused to take that step.
He ordered his administration, in the same document, to examine other Trump health policies that he could override, such as certain job requirements for Medicaid and restrictions on abortion counseling.
It is all an effort to “undo the damage that Trump has done,” said Biden, and restore things “that by decree he changed”.
Now, across the range of public policy, fiat is chasing fiat.