In his first tweet as president, Joe Biden made it clear his intention to go to work from the first minute. “There is no time to waste when it comes to addressing the crises we are facing,” his official report published minutes after he was sworn in. Said and done: when the pomp was over, the formal act ended and with everyone in place, Biden set to work.
Undoing the mess his predecessor left him will be a daunting task, and more so with all the promises he made on his way to today, the hope of the many actions for his first hundred days.
On the job to take immediate action in four areas: managing the pandemic, providing economic assistance, tackling climate change and promoting racial equality; four of the main pillars of Biden’s agenda.
In the first image in the Oval Office, completely redecorated (except for the curtains, which hold the previous tenant’s gold in anticipation of a more in-depth design change), Biden appeared with a stack of folders and documents to sign. right: 17 executive orders to start his government’s machinery.
Surrounded by busts of Martin Luther King, the activist César Chávez, Rosa Parks or Eleanor Roosevelt, and in front of a portrait of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joe Biden began stamping his signature (with a ballpoint pen, not a giant marker like his predecessor) on decrees that must channel their administration.
The first order he signed was a clear message: the biggest crisis he is facing today is the coronavirus pandemic, and he will do everything he can to stop it. So he decided to enact a mandate for face masks and social distance on federal properties. Then an assignment for racial equality; and the return to the Paris climate accords.
In the list of signed actions, it also stopped funding the wall on the border with Mexico; brought DACA, the program that protects tens of thousands of undocumented juveniles from deportation, back to its initial status and removed all obstacles imposed afterwards; urged to join the World Health Organization (WHO), cancel the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline and revoke the migrant veto of Muslim-majority countries, among others: a series of measures to counter some of the outgoing government’s most controversial and controversial , showing the country and the world that there is a new leader and that things are already being handled differently. He later suspended the “Stay in Mexico” program, requiring asylum seekers in the United States to wait their turn to be heard in the neighboring country.
Foreign Minister Marcelo Ebrard welcomed the measures on the wall and DACA, recalling that President Andrés Manuel López Obrador told Biden that “bridges open the way to cooperation and understanding”.
Kamala Harris wasn’t a waste of time either. “What’s the first thing you will do?” Some reporters yelled at her as the new vice president moved into her new office, on the triumphal walk after the inauguration ceremony. “Get to work,” he replied. And, as Biden did with his decrees, Harris did his duty.
A few minutes after taking the photos for the story for the office building he will occupy, Harris climbed back into the official car to return to the Capitol and fulfill his first official duty: presiding over the Senate and taking the oath of senators who had not yet done so. claimed his seat.
It was the case of Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, the two second-round winners in Georgia, and Alex Padilla, the one who was chosen to fill the California vacancy that Harris himself had left. The three Democrats, all three are breaking historical milestones: the first millennial, the first African American by Georgia, the first Latino by California, respectively.
Most importantly, with the inauguration of all of them, the upper house was completely left behind and the absolute takeover of the Democrats in Washington consolidated: the Senate had 50 senators for each party, but Harris’s casting vote, as President of the Senate, throws the Democrats off balance.
Republicans lost the last bit of power they had in the capital, and the conservative Mitch McConnell, who had become a very powerful figure in recent years, was relegated to the background. The new Senate majority leader is Democrat Chuck Schumer, who didn’t waste a minute changing his Twitter bio to make it clear that he’s now the one with the camera handles.
Soon after, the Senate confirmed Biden’s first cabinet nominee, Avril Haines, as Director of National Intelligence.