Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
For Biden, there’s no place like a weekend home in Delaware
As he stood in the Rose Garden celebrating his first big legislative win, President Joe Biden gestured to the White House and said it’s a “magnificent building” to live in. Except on weekends. Of the eight weekends since Biden took office, he has spent three at his longtime home outside Wilmington, Delaware, including this weekend. Tentative plans for another weekend visit were scrubbed due to Senate action on Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief plan.
Biden also spent a weekend at the Camp David presidential retreat in Maryland.
Many presidents have complained at one point or another about feeling confined in the White House. Biden already has echoed earlier presidents in comparing the experience to living in a “gilded cage.”
So trading the 132-room executive mansion for a less confining, more relaxing weekend hangout can help presidents unwind, said University of Chicago political scientist William Howell.
“What he wanted to be was president,” Howell said. “It is not the White House per se that is the draw.”
The White House defends Biden’s leisure travel at a time when both he and federal health officials have been pleading with the public to take the coronavirus pandemic seriously, including by avoiding unnecessary travel.
“The president lives in Wilmington. It’s his home. That’s where he’s lived for many, many years,” press secretary Jen Psaki said recently. “And as you know, as any president of the United States does, he takes a private airplane called Air Force One to travel there.”
“I think most Americans would also see that as a unique circumstance,” she said of the government aircraft available to Biden.
No president travels alone, though, no matter how private the plane. It requires that lots of other people travel as well. And the costs mount quickly.
Besides the Air Force flight crew, a president’s travel party includes Secret Service agents, White House staff, journalists and family. Depending on the destination and purpose of the trip, lawmakers, Cabinet secretaries or other guests may fly with the president.
Biden occasionally brought some of his six grandchildren on trips when he was vice president, as well as during last year’s presidential campaign.
Presidential travel doesn’t come cheap.
Federal agencies spent an estimated $13.6 million on four trips that then-President Donald Trump took to his waterfront Mar-aLago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, in February and March of 2017, the Government Accountability Office reported in 2019.
The figure includes $10.6 million to operate government aircraft and boats, and $3 million for transportation, lodging, meals and other expenses for government personnel supporting the president on the road, the report said.
But not all presidential travel is the same.
Trump took the more familiar version of Air Force One, a modified 747, on the two-hour-plus flight to the commercial airport in West Palm Beach, Florida. Biden has flown a smaller version of the aircraft for the roughly half-hour flight to the Delaware Air National Guard Base. He made this weekend’s trip on the Marine One presidential helicopter.
Trump’s Florida home is on the water, which required the addition of Coast Guard security patrols.
Biden goes back to his
longtime home near Wilmington, where he lived as a senator before being elected vice president in 2008 and where he returned after his time in that office was up.
Now serving as Biden’s weekend refuge, the home is where he watched Tom Brady, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers’ new quarterback, win a record seventh Super Bowl ring in February. While there, Biden often meets with advisers, attends church and enjoys Sunday dinner with the family.
“We try to keep the Sunday night dinners,” Jill Biden told TV talk-show host Kelly Clarkson. “I mean, it’s been a little busy lately. We still do it, and the kids look forward to it.”
Biden owns a second home in the seaside community of Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. He has yet to visit it since becoming president but it could see more action as the weather warms up.
During a tearful farewell in January as he left Wilmington
for Washington, Biden credited the state with helping shape his values, character and world view. “It all comes from Delaware,” he said.
Biden lived the majority
of his 78 years in Wilmington after his parents relocated from Scranton, Pennsylvania, when he was a boy. He represented Delaware in the U.S. Senate for 36 years, and was a regular passenger on the Amtrak train to and from Washington.
“Getting out of the White House was more cumbersome than it is now,” said Doug Wead, a former White House aide and author of books about presidents and their families.
Early presidents were consigned to bumpy trains, he said. But motorcades, Air Force One and Marine One all help to ease a modern president’s path out of the nation’s capital.
But there is no presidential playbook for how and where to spend the weekend.
Trump spent many weekends at Mar-a-Lago or his Trump golf club in central New Jersey, leading critics to accuse him of trying to profit off the presidency.
Barack Obama spent most Saturdays and Sundays in Washington because his young daughters belonged to weekend soccer and basketball leagues.
George W. Bush had his ranch in Crawford, Texas.
Howell said Biden — who has cultivated his image as a “regular Joe” — has strong connections to his family, many of whom are in Delaware, that he wants to maintain.
The president’s first wife, Neilia, and their baby daughter, Naomi, who were killed in a 1972 car accident, and their son Beau, who died of brain cancer in 2015 at age 46, are buried in a cemetery at the church where Biden attends services.
People close to Biden also note the strong affection he has for Delaware.
As he left the state in January, Biden, who is of Irish descent, alluded to an Irish poet who is believed to have said Dublin will be written on his heart when he dies.
Overcome with emotion, Biden said, “when I die, Delaware will be written on my heart.”
“We’ve never had a court like this, with so many justices clearly opposed to the constitutional protection of abortion rights.” — Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights
“It’s been our job as activists to keep passing these state bills and challenging the status of Roe.” — Mallory Quigley, vice president of communications at Susan B. Anthony List, a national anti-abortion group
At an intense pace, lawmakers in Republican-governed states are considering an array of tough antiabortion restrictions they hope might reach the Supreme Court and win approval from its conservative majority, overturning the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that established a nationwide right to abortion.
A sweeping ban already has been signed into law in South Carolina, only to be swiftly blocked by a lawsuit from abortion-rights groups. Arkansas’ governor signed another ban this past week.
A batch of other near-total bans also were blocked in the courts after their passage in 2019.
It’s not clear if or when the Supreme Court might consider any of them, or take some other path. The court could weaken Roe with approval of less drastic
restrictions or even leave the core of the 1973 ruling in place.
“Anyone who tells you what the Supreme Court is going to do is pulling your leg,” said Jennifer Popik, federal legislative director for the National Right to Life Committee.
What’s clear is that the federal judiciary changed dramatically during Donald
Trump’s presidency. In addition to three appointments to the Supreme Court, giving it a 6-3 conservative majority, Trump made scores of appointments to federal district and appellate courts. That raises the possibility that previously rejected antiabortion measures might now be upheld.
State Rep. John McCravy,
a Republican who sponsored the South Carolina ban, said Roe v. Wade was on his mind in crafting the bill.
“This is a decision that the Supreme Court is going to need to make,” he said. “Certainly it’s encouraging to see the court changing and to see hope at the end of the tunnel.”
The South Carolina law,
like several passed by other states in 2019, would ban most abortions after a fetal heartbeat is detected, typically about six weeks after conception.
In Arkansas, the bill Gov. Asa Hutchinson signed Tuesday goes further, banning all abortions except when performed to save the life of the mother. It has no exceptions for rape or incest.
Hutchinson had favored including those exemptions but signed the bill anyway as an explicit challenge to Roe.
“It is the intent of the legislation to set the stage for the Supreme Court overturning current case law,” he said.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Arkansas plans to challenge the ban in court.
Arkansas and South Carolina are among more than 15 states where lawmakers have proposed near-total abortion bans this year, according to the Guttmacher Institute, which advocates for abortion access.
Guttmacher’s director for state issues, Elizabeth Nash, said the total number of anti-abortion measures this year is nearly 400 — on par with other recent years. What’s different, she said, is the fast pace at which some bills are moving.
“State legislatures are putting abortion restrictions and bans on the front burner, at the top of their agenda,” Nash said.
In addition to sweeping bans, states are considering an array of other restrictions. They include limiting access to medication abortions, banning abortion after 20 weeks of pregnancy, banning it in cases of fetal anomalies such as Down syndrome, and outlawing a common second trimester abortion procedure known as dilation and evacuation.
Some anti-abortion activists suggest the Supreme Court may take an incremental approach, upholding measures that fall short of a near-total ban but still would weaken Roe. That ruling held that abortions should be legal up to the point of a fetus’ viability — roughly 24 weeks.
“It’s been our job as activists to keep passing these state bills and challenging the status of Roe,” said Mallory Quigley, vice president of communications at Susan B. Anthony List, a national anti-abortion group.
“There’s always been a concerted effort to give the court a menu of different options they can choose from,” she said.
Jennifer Dalven, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, suggests the Supreme Court, under Chief Justice John Roberts, may prefer to weaken Roe by curtailing abortion access rather than take up a case that could lead to Roe’s outright reversal.
“Even if Roe stays on the books, it will be harder and harder for people in the South and Midwest and Great Plains to get abortions,” Dalven said, referring to regions where Republicans generally dominate state politics. “Roberts can allow the wall to get higher and higher and yet not provoke that headline that the Supreme Court overturns Roe.”
One pending case could provide a strong hint about the high court’s intentions. It may announce soon whether it will consider Mississippi’s bid to enforce a 15-week abortion ban. If accepted, the case would provide an opportunity for the reconfigured court to dramatically change the way Roe is applied.
Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights, said it would be “shocking” if the Supreme Court agreed to consider the Mississippi case.
“The only reason would be to do fundamental damage to Roe,” she said. “We’ve never had a court like this, with so many justices clearly opposed to the constitutional protection of abortion rights.”
Northup also is wary of another possible scenario, in which one of the increasingly conservative federal appellate courts upholds a state restriction that undercuts Roe. She said the Supreme Court could decline to hear appeals, letting the restriction take effect in the states belonging to that judicial circuit. That could embolden abortion foes to seek similar outcomes in other regions.
Michael New, an abortion opponent who teaches social research at Catholic University of America, predicts the Supreme Court will move slowly.
“Over time, I think states will be allowed to do more to protect the preborn,” he said. “But court decisions will likely only allow for gradual changes in public policy.”
At the state level, recent elections have made a difference in abortion politics.
Montana’s first Republican governor in 16 years, Greg Gianforte, has promised to sign at least two of four measures restricting abortion that have already passed the Legislature. Three — including one to ban all abortions after 20 weeks of gestation — were vetoed by Gianforte’s Democratic predecessor.
In New Hampshire, where Republicans regained majorities in the House and Senate in November, the House has passed two abortion-related bills, including one allowing doctors to be prosecuted for withholding medical care for any baby born alive.
Meanwhile, some states where Democrats have taken control are acting to protect or expand abortion access. Virginia’s General Assembly is repealing a ban on abortion coverage in some health insurance plans. New Mexico’s Democratic governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, signed legislation repealing an abortion ban enacted before the 1973 Roe ruling.
“With uncertainty at the federal level, New Mexico needs to be clear about women’s rights, women’s health care, women’s reproductive choices, abortion and abortion care,” Lujan Grisham said.