WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden has arrived at the White House ready to use his pen to dismantle Donald Trump’s legacy and start pushing his own priorities.
Presidents Trump and Barack Obama relied on executive orders and other presidential directives to get some of their most controversial policies around a stalled Congress. But no president has come out of the gate as eager to use authority as Biden.
An opinion on how presidential power works and its often transient impact:
EXECUTIVE ORDERS: BASICS
An executive order is a directive signed, written and published by the president who manages the operations of the federal government.
Congress can not just pass legislation to revoke an order, but can use legislative action – such as cutting funding – to eliminate the president’s intentions. A new president may overturn the order of the predecessor by issuing another executive order effectively canceling it. Biden did so repeatedly in his early days in office, while seeking to eliminate Trump’s policies on a range of issues, including environmental regulations, immigration policies and the government’s response to the coronavirus pandemic.
The presidents returning to George Washington have issued thousands of directives to manage the affairs of the federal government, according to data collected by the US Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Many are harmless, such as granting federal employees the day after Christmas. But the orders of the executive – and their political brothers who produce sausages, the proclamation and the political memorandum – can also be used by a president to push political goals that the leader cannot achieve through Congress.
BACK ADVENTURE The clock
Time is of the essence for Biden, who has vowed as a candidate to act swiftly to control the coronavirus pandemic and undo what he considers the damage caused by Trump’s policies.
Many of Biden’s orders in its early days are directly related to the pandemic – a masked mandate on federal property, an executive order that provides guidance on the safe reopening of schools and stops to increase food aid and protect people in need. looking for a job in case of unemployment due to the virus.
But Biden also used executive action to try to turn the clock back more than four years to the Obama presidency.
For example, Biden issued an order to reverse Trump-era Pentagon policy, which largely banned transgender people. from military service. Trump himself issued an order reversing an Obama action that laid the groundwork for transgender people to serve openly.
Biden also signed a memorandum to keep the action delayed for childhood arrivals, the Obama-era program that has protected hundreds of thousands of people who have come to the US illegally as children from deportation since it was created in 2012 by an Obama directive. Trump issued his own executive order to cancel DACA in 2017.
Other orders targeting the latest administration’s fundamental policies include a Biden directive to reverse Trump’s ban on travelers from several predominantly Muslim countries, executive action to join the Paris climate deal, and a proclamation halting the construction of his predecessor’s border wall .
BOTH PARTIES DO; BOTH SIDES COMPLAIN
Certainly, the modern presidents of both parties have been heavy users of the 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 one term, signed 220 orders.
Not surprisingly, some Republicans have complained about Biden’s early confidence in the executive. Tennessee Sen. Marsha Blackburn mocked in a tweet, “@POTUS, you can’t govern with a pen and a phone.”
Democrats have generally hailed Biden’s orders as a necessary solution to some of Trump’s most divisive policies. But the president also faced substantive criticism from both the left and the right over some of the first orders.
Republicans have complained that Biden is losing dollars to taxpayers by stopping construction on the US border wall because signed construction contracts will still have to be paid. On the left, some racial justice and civil liberties groups were overwhelmed by a series of orders that Biden issued in what White House officials said was an open-ended effort to address racial fairness and injustice.
Biden sold himself to voters as an antidote to what Washington needs: the deeply experienced statesman who could bring the bipartisan county to Washington. As his presidency unfolds, an over-reliance on executive orders could undermine this argument.
LIMITATION OF THE PRESIDENT’S ORDER
The courts and Congress can test the president’s power to govern by executive fiat.
Biden has already seen his attempt to order a 100-day deportation moratorium surrounded by a federal judge. U.S. District Judge Drew Tipton found that the Biden administration had failed to “provide any concrete and reasonable justification” for a break in deportations and ordered a restraining order blocking Biden’s order.
President Harry Truman saw his attempt to seize steelmaking facilities in the middle of the Korean War thwarted by the US Supreme Court, which found that the president did not have the authority to confiscate private property without congressional permission.
Obama has tried to use executive authority to fulfill his campaign promise to close the US military detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, which has held many international terrorist suspects over the years. Congress prevented him from voting to block funding to pay for the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the United States, including for prosecution or medical care.
HERE TODAY, LEFT TOMORROW
Both Trump’s and Obama’s experiences underscore the transient nature of executive orders.
Both Trump and Obama have seen their most enduring political legacies come through congressional legislation – for Trump, the 2017 tax cuts, and for Obama, his signature, the Affordable Care Act.
Trump tried hard, but failed to push a Republican-controlled Congress to repeal “Obamacare.” However, he downplayed a key aspect of the health care law when his own tax review legislation reduced the penalty for uninsurance to $ 0.
Now, Trump sees many of his own orders, proclamations and memoranda crushed by Biden. And Biden could very well see many of his executive actions unfolded by anyone following him in office.
Biden Economic Adviser Brian Deese acknowledged that some of the president’s executive actions – such as directives to reorganize government calculations on food assistance for Americans living in poverty and another extension of moratoriums on evacuations for Americans whose lives have been supported by the pandemic – were simply steps the president is trying to win bipartisan support for a $ 1.9 trillion coronavirus aid package.
Finally, Deese said, the orders, while useful, are pale substitutes for the comprehensive legislative action passed by Congress.