In early going, Biden floods the zone with decrees
WASHINGTON
—Modern American presidents have found that a good way to get off to a fast start in office is to issue decrees like an ancient king.
With a pen as their scepter, they“hereby proclaim.” They “order,” “direct,” “revoke” and “declare ,” rendering commandments in regal language drawn from the deep past. President Joe Biden is flooding the zone with them, achieving head- snapping changes in national policy that he would have no hope of getting from Congress quickly, if at all.
Easy come, though, can also mean easy go. As President Donald Trump discovered with his hard-charging and often ill-fated executive actions, courts can be quick to shoot them down. Congress can effectively override them and at most they're only good until a contrarian president takes over and whipsaws off in another direction again.
Can transgender troops have ali feint he armed forces? Not openly under Trump. Under Bid en, yes they can. Under who comes next, who knows?
For now, though, the l umbering government is seeing change at light speed.
In Biden's opening days, he put the U.S. back into the Paris climate accord, ended Trump' s restrictions on travel from some Muslim- majority countries, froze further construction of Trump's border wall, protected immigrants who were brought to the U.S. illegally as children, and reversed Trump's rollback of energy efficiency and pollution standards. That's just a sampling.
Altogether, Biden has brought a transformation both int one and substance in the earliest days of his presidency. After the bell owing, never-self-questioning Trump, almost anyone would.
Twitter is a dead zone now for seeing what's on a president's mind in the moment. Things are being heard from the Oval Office that are foreign to our ears in recent times: “Correct me if I'm wrong.” “How can I say it polite ly ?” “I misspoke.” Wearing am ask is mandated on federal property and encouraged everywhere; meantime the gags have come off the government's top public health scientists.
But Biden's expressions of humility and his common courtesies only go so far. When it comes to dismantling a predecessor's legacy with the stroke of a pen and the words “I have hereunto set my hand,” Biden is off to a fierce start and, like many before him, testing the limits of what a president can do by decree.
“A lot of what he has done has been unwinding what Trump had done,” said Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist and expert on presidential powers and executive actions .“Virtually all presidents push the envelope and do things that expand the scope of executive authority.”
President Ba rack Ob am as truck a-multi national nuclear deal with Iran and shaped and joined the Paris accord without Congress signing on, using the recognized authority of presidents to make international deals but leaving those moves vulnerable without t he as sent of lawmakers. Trump withdrew the U.S. from both.
Unable to get Congress top ass immigration legislation, Obama unilaterally shielded young immigrants from deportation, leaving nothing in law to guarantee their protections would last.
For most of his first year in office, until his tax cuts passed in late 2017, Trump chalked up no major legislative achievements despite having Republican control of Congress at the time. He did not score many big wins in law after, either, beyond budget agreements. But he was relentless with executive actions.
“Every president looks for those opportunities,” Mayer said. “What Trump did was take the brakes off and do things that previous presidents had not done. He was enamored of hi s own powers. He was unusually aggres-sive and didn't respect the norm-based limits of what presidents ought to do.
“A lot of it was really quite sloppy ,” he added. “Shockingly incompetent.”