WASHINGTON (AP) – Modern American presidents have found that a good way to get office quickly is to issue decrees like an old king.
With a pen as a scepter they proclaim ‘with this’. They ‘order’, ‘direct’, ‘revoke’ and ‘declare’, and deliver commandments in royal language from the deep past. President Joe Biden floods the zone with them, to bring about groundbreaking changes in national policy that he would not at all hope to get from Congress quickly.
Getting easy, however, can also mean easy. As President Donald Trump discovered with his hard-hitting and often bad executive actions, courts can quickly dismiss it. Congress can effectively dominate them and at most it is only good until a contradictory president takes over again and swings in another direction again.
Can transgender troops have a life in the military? Not openly under Trump. Under Biden, yes, they can. Among whom comes next, who knows?
But for now, the clumsy government is seeing change at light speed.
In Biden’s opening days, he put the US back in the Paris climate agreement, ended Trump’s restrictions on travel from some Muslim-majority countries, froze the further construction of Trump’s border wall, protected immigrants brought to the US illegally as children, and reversed Trump’s repercussions of energy efficiency and pollution standards This is just a sampling.
Altogether, in the earliest days of his presidency, Biden brought about a transformation in tone and content. After the booming, never-self-questioning Trump, almost anyone would do it.
Twitter is now a dead zone to see what a president is thinking at the moment. In recent times, things have been heard from the Oval Office that are foreign to our ears: “Fix me if I’m wrong.” “How can I say it politely?” “I was wrong.” Wearing a mask is mandatory on federal property and is encouraged everywhere; meanwhile, the faces of the government’s leading public health scientists have come down.
But Biden’s expressions of humility and his general courtesy go just as far. When it comes to dismantling the legacy of a predecessor with a pen stroke and the words ‘I put my hand on this’, Biden begins fiercely and, like many before him, tests the limits of what a president can do by order.
“A lot of what he did turned down 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 print the envelope and do things that expand the scope of the executive.”
President Barack Obama entered into a multinational nuclear deal with Iran, forming and concluding the Paris Agreement without Congress signing using the recognized authority of presidents to engage in international transactions, but leaving the movements vulnerable without the consent of the legislators. Trump withdrew the U.S. from both.
Because Congress could not pass immigration legislation, Obama unilaterally protected young immigrants from deportation, leaving nothing in the law to ensure that their protection would last.
During most of his first year in office, until his tax cuts passed in late 2017, Trump did not make any significant legislative achievements, despite the then Republican control of Congress. He also does not achieve many major victories in law, apart from budget agreements. But he was ruthless with executive action.
“Every president is looking for opportunities,” Mayer said. “What Trump did was take the brakes off and do things that previous presidents did not do. He was in love with his own powers. He was extremely aggressive and did not respect the norm-based limits of what presidents should do.
“A lot of it was really sloppy,” he added. “Shockingly incompetent.”
Trump’s orders to restrict access to some Muslim countries have been repeatedly blocked by federal judges until a weakened version succeeds in the Supreme Court. He declared a national state of emergency when no nationally recognized one existed on the southern border, allowing him to direct money already approved by Congress, but for other purposes, to its border wall.
Then there were the federal states and waters that former presidents acted to protect against development. Trump watched them.
“For more than 100 years, it has been the accepted meaning of the declaration of national monuments that it was a one-way door,” Mayer said. “You could not declare a national monument.” But the use broke in 2017 with Trump’s executive action to review or diminish the protected status of large acres of national monument land.
Biden moves to counter this against an order of his own. But its deployment of executive actions a few months in the making was not yet entirely smooth.
In Texas, a federal judge has issued a temporary restraining order by prohibiting the government from applying a 100-day deportation moratorium to most deportations, he ruled that the new government could not provide a concrete, reasonable justification for it.
Biden has recognized the limits of his early course of one-sidedness as he joins Congress in pushing for heavy lifts over pandemic relief and its ambitious legislative agenda. Only verdict by ‘executive fiat’, he would ‘bring us virtually nowhere’.
Republicans buzzed about Biden’s busy signature pen and voiced the standard complaint about presidential supremacy coming from any party outside the power in the White House.
Biden was a bit tested on the setback when asked if Congress might require him to send the pandemic aid package in pieces instead of as a whole. “Nobody demands that I do anything,” he said with a monarchical boom.
Biden burst out at the gate with a few dozen executive actions. It remains to be seen whether he will surpass the one-sidedness of Trump, who has signed an average of 55 executive orders a year, the most in any term since Jimmy Carter, who achieved an average of 80 per year.
On this front is the king under President Franklin Roosevelt, who signed an average of 307 a year and linked that activism to high legislation that drives the country through depression and war.
If executive action is often fleeting, legislation is anything but.
While nothing Washington does is permanent, it is difficult to deepen legislative legislation. So it was with “Obamacare,” the law that the Republicans swore from the beginning to push up, but never could.
Trump’s first executive order, on the day of his inauguration, was aimed at unraveling the affordable care law. But the presidential decision could not take away Congress’ prescription, and the repeated attempts by Republican lawmakers to stop voting on it could not be removed either.
Biden also had an executive order. On Thursday, he ordered the law’s health insurance markets to reopen for a special sign-up window., which gives the uninsured the chance to find cover in a raging pandemic after the Trump administration refused to take that step.
He instructed his administration in the same document to examine other Trump health care policies he may destroy, such as certain job requirements for Medicaid and combating abortion counseling.
It’s all an attempt to “undo the damage Trump did,” Biden said, and to repair things “that he changed through a change.”
Now, within the range of public policy, chase fiat fiat.