WASHINGTON (AP) – Modern American presidents have found that a good way to get started quickly is to issue decrees like an ancient king.
With a pen as a scepter, they “proclaim by presence.” They “order,” “direct,” “revoke,” and “declare,” rendering commandments in royal language drawn from the deep past. President Joe Biden is flooding the area with them, making strong changes in national policy that he would have no hope of getting quickly from Congress, if not.
Easy to come in, however, can also mean an easy walk. As President Donald Trump has discovered with his hard-to-carry and often unhappy executive actions, the courts can be quick to take them down. Congress can remove them effectively, and at most they are good only until an opposing president takes control and moves in another direction.
Can transgender troops have a life in the military? Not open under Trump. Sub Biden, yes, pot. Under whom comes the next, who knows?
For now, however, the stifling government is seeing change at the speed of light.
In Biden’s opening days, he put the US back in the Paris climate deal, ended Trump’s restrictions on travel in some Muslim-majority countries, froze the continued construction of Trump’s border wall, protected immigrants who were illegally brought to the United States as children and reversed Trump’s return to energy efficiency and pollution standards. It’s just a test.
In total, Biden made a transformation in both tone and substance in the early days of his presidency. After Trump’s non-self-proclaiming cry, almost anyone would.
Twitter is now a dead end to see what is in a president’s mind right now. From the oval desk we hear things that are foreign to our ears lately: “Correct me if I’m wrong.” “How can I say it politely?” “I’m missing my word.” Wearing a mask is mandatory on federal property and encouraged everywhere; in the meantime, the gags have come off the best public health scientists.
But Biden’s expressions of humility and his common kindness go so far. When it comes to dismantling the legacy of his predecessor with a stroke of the pen and the words “I put my hand here,” Biden begins in a fierce beginning and, like many before him, tests the limits of what a presidential decree can do.
“Much of what he did was reveal what Trump did,” 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 extend the scope of executive authority.”
President Barack Obama has entered into a multinational agreement with Iran and formed and joined the Paris agreement without Congress signing, using the recognized authority of the presidents to conclude international agreements, but leaving those movements vulnerable without parliamentary consent. Trump withdrew the US from both.
Unable to persuade Congress to pass immigration legislation, Obama unilaterally protected young immigrants from deportation, leaving nothing in the law to guarantee their protection.
For most of his first year in office, until his tax cuts passed in late 2017, Trump did not achieve major legislative accomplishments, despite Republican control of Congress at the time. He also did not get many big victories in law, after the budget agreements. But he was relentless in his executive actions.
“Every president is looking for those opportunities,” Mayer said. “What Trump did was brake and do things that previous presidents had not done. He was in love with his own powers. He was unusually aggressive and did not follow the rules-based limits of what presidents should do.
“A lot of it was really pretty careless,” he added. “Shockingly incompetent.”
Trump’s orders to restrict entry into some Muslim countries have been repeatedly blocked by federal judges until a weakened version was adopted in the Supreme Court. He declared a national emergency when there was no nationally recognized one on the southern border, allowing 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 set his eyes on them.
“For over 100 years, it has been the accepted meaning of declaring national monuments a one-way door,” Mayer said. “You could not declare a national monument.” But this habit was shattered in 2017 with Trump’s executive action to revise or reduce the protected status of vast acres of national landmarks.
Biden moved to counter this with his own order. But the launch of its executive actions for several months in progress has not been entirely smooth.
In Texas, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order banning the government from imposing a 100-day deportation moratorium on most deportations, ruling that the new administration provided “no concrete and reasonable justification” for it.
Biden has acknowledged the limitations of his initial course of unilateralism as he prepares for heavy-handed rises with Congress to help the pandemic and its ambitious legislative agenda. Just governing by “executive fiat,” he said, “will get us virtually nowhere.”
Republicans growled at Biden’s busy pen, expressing the standard complaint about the presidential overthrow coming from any of the White House parties.
Biden was a little upset about the push when asked if Congress could ask him to send the pandemic relief package in pieces instead of a whole. “No one asks me to do anything,” he said with a monarchical flourish.
Biden came out of the gate with dozens of executive actions. It remains to be seen whether he will overcome Trump’s unilateralism, which has signed an average of 55 executive orders a year, the longest in any Jimmy Carter term., who was on average 80 years old per year.
On this front, the king of presidents is Franklin Roosevelt, who signed an average of 307 a year and associated activism with imposing legislation that has run the country through depression and war.
If enforcement is often transient, the legislation is different.
Although there is no permanence in anything Washington does, the hard-won legislation is gaining deep roots. So it was with “Obamacare,” the law the Republicans vowed to lift from the beginning, but they never could.
Trump’s first executive order, on the day of his inauguration, was clearly aimed at enacting the Affordable Care Act. But the presidential decree could not remove what Congress ordered, nor the repeated efforts of Republican lawmakers to vote for it out of existence.
Biden also had an executive order in this regard. On Thursday ordered the reopening of the legal health insurance markets for a special registration window, giving the uninsured a chance to find cover in a furious pandemic after the Trump administration refused to take that step.
He ordered his administration in the same document to examine other Trump health care policies that it could repeal, such as certain Medicaid work requirements and restrictions on abortion counseling.
It’s all an effort to “undo the damage Trump has done,” Biden said, and to restore “the things he changed with fiat.”
Now, across the range of public policies, fiat is pursuing fiat.