WASHINGTON (AP) – Modern American presidents have found that a good way to get into office quickly is to issue decrees like an ancient king.
With a pen as a scepter, they “proclaim for the present.” He “orders,” “directs,” “revokes,” and “declares,” making commandments in a gift language drawn from the deep past. President Joe Biden floods the area with them, achieving rapid changes in national policy that he would have no hope of getting quickly from Congress, if at all.
Easy to come by, however, can also mean going easy. As President Donald Trump discovered with his heavily charged and often unfortunate executive actions, the courts can be quick to overthrow them. Congress can effectively overturn them, and at most they are only good until an opposing president takes over and dries up in another direction.
Can transgender troops live in the armed forces? Not openly under Trump. Under Biden, yes they can. Under who comes next, who knows?
For now, however, the heavy government sees changes in the speed of light.
In the early days of Biden, he put the United States back on the Paris climate deal, ended Trump’s restrictions on travel to some Muslim-majority countries, froze the construction of the Trump border wall , protected immigrants who were brought to the United States illegally as children and reversed Trump’s setback in energy efficiency and pollution standards. This is just a sampling.
Overall, Biden has produced a transformation in both tone and background in the early days of his presidency. After Trump’s cry, which was never questioned, almost anyone would.
Twitter is now a dead zone to see what a president has in mind right now. From the oval office we are hearing things that are strange to us lately: “Correct me if I’m wrong.” “How can I say that politely?” “I need a word.” Wearing a mask is mandatory on federal property and is encouraged everywhere; Meanwhile, the gags have come out of the government’s top public health scientists.
But Biden’s expressions of humility and his common courtesies only go that far. When it comes to dismantling the legacy of a predecessor with a stroke of the pen and the words “I shook hands,” Biden begins fiercely and, like many before him, tests the limits of what a president’s decree can do. .
“Much of what he’s done has been unfolding what Trump had done,” said Kenneth Mayer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an expert on presidential powers and executive action. “Virtually all presidents push the envelope and do things that expand the scope of the executive branch.”
President Barack Obama established a multinational nuclear deal with Iran and formed and joined the Paris agreement without Congress signing it, using the recognized authority of presidents to make international agreements, but leaving these movements vulnerable. without the consent of legislators. Trump withdrew the U.S. from both.
Unable to get Congress to pass immigration legislation, Obama unilaterally protected young immigrants from deportation, leaving nothing in the way of guarantees that their protections would last.
For most of his first year in office, until his tax cuts passed in late 2017, Trump did not achieve any major legislative success despite having Republican control of Congress at the time. Nor did he get many big victories in law after the budget deals. But he was relentless with executive actions.
“Every president is looking for these opportunities,” Mayer said. “What Trump did was slow down and do things that previous presidents hadn’t done. He was in love with his own powers. He was unusually aggressive and didn’t respect the normative limits of what presidents had to do.
“A lot of it was really pretty sloppy,” he added. “Surprisingly 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 its border wall.
Then there were the federal lands and waters that previous presidents had acted to protect from development. Trump looked at them.
“For more than 100 years, it was the accepted meaning of declaring national monuments that it was a one-way door,” Mayer said. “It could not be declared a national monument.” But this custom was broken in 2017 with Trump’s executive action to revise or reduce the protection status of vast acres of national monument land.
Biden went on to counter it with his own order. But its implementation of executive actions for several months in progress has not been entirely fluid.
In Texas, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order prohibiting the government from applying a 100-day deportation moratorium to most deportations, ruling that the new administration had provided “no concrete and reasonable justification” for this.
Biden has acknowledged the limits of his first course of unilateralism as he prepares to make strong rises with Congress on pandemic relief and its ambitious legislative agenda. Simply governing by “executive fiat,” he said, “will take us virtually nowhere.”
Republicans grunted over Biden’s busy signature pen, expressing the standard complaint about the presidential reach coming from any party that is out of power in the White House.
Biden was a little troubled about the setback when asked if Congress could require him to send the pandemic relief package instead of doing so altogether. “No one demands that I do anything,” she said with a monarchical flourish.
Biden walked out the door with several dozen executive actions. It remains to be seen whether he will overcome the unilateralism of Trump, who signed an average of 55 executive orders a year, the highest in any term since Jimmy Carter, which averaged 80 a year.
On this front, the king of presidents is Franklin Roosevelt, who signed 307 a year on average and paired this activism with imposing legislation that guided the country through depression and war.
If executive action is often ephemeral, legislation is nothing.
While there is no permanence in anything Washington does, much-earned legislation usually sinks deep roots. So it has been with “Obamacare,” the law that Republicans vowed to give up from the beginning, but they never could.
Trump’s first executive order, on the day of his inauguration, was aimed directly at unraveling the Affordable Care Act. But the presidential decree could not take away what Congress had ordered nor the repeated efforts of Republican lawmakers to vote it out of its existence.
Biden also had an executive order on the matter. Thursday ordered the reopening of the health insurance markets of the law to obtain a special registration window, giving the uninsured a chance to find coverage in a rapid pandemic after the Trump administration refused to take that step.
In the same document, he ordered his administration to examine other Trump health care policies that it could overturn, such as certain labor requirements for Medicaid and curb abortion counseling.
It’s all an effort to “undo the damage Trump has done,” Biden said, and restore things “that fiat changed.”
Now, through the realm of public policy, Fiat is pursuing Fiat.