President Joe Biden will likely increasingly rely on the power of his pen to implement left-leaning priorities as bills begin to pile up in the evenly divided Senate, experts say.
After 100 days in the White House, Biden has left a long trail of executive action paperwork behind him. As of mid-April, for instance, he had signed 40 executive orders, outpacing former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump. Biden’s 100th day, an artificial presidential marker since Franklin Roosevelt, delineates the end of the administration’s set-play politics as it pivots to deal with more unanticipated matters amid the pandemic.
And with Democratic-crafted legislation unlikely to attract the required support of at least 10 Republican senators to pass Congress, Biden soon will have little choice but to become even more aggressive going it alone, when he can both legally and in meaningful ways turn as much of his party’s agenda into policy. To be sure, he will face intense pressure from various factions within the Democratic Party to do just that.
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Biden exerted hard and fast executive action early in his administration while determining how much, if any, support he might get from GOP lawmakers. So far, their support for his surprisingly leftist agenda has been scant as the White House and Democratic leaders on the Hill try to enact as much of their agenda as possible using special rules that allow a simple majority vote margin in the Senate, a fast-track rule that can be used only a few times.
On his first day in office, Biden took a raft of executive action to start rolling back Trump’s legacy, including overturning his predecessor’s so-called “Muslim travel ban” and “zero tolerance” approach to illegal immigration, reentering the climate-focused Paris Agreement, and mandating mask-wearing on federal property. It was the first in a series of power plays, staggered around issues such as the coronavirus pandemic, the economy, healthcare, even equity and equality.
“There’s a lot of talk, with good reason, about the number of executive orders that I have signed,” Biden said in February. “I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy.”
Just this week, Biden signed an order increasing federal contractors’ hourly minimum wage to $15 from Jan. 30,
after the Senate parliamentarian nixed language from his $1.9 trillion coronavirus spending package last month that would steadily raise the federal wage to that amount over the next five years.
Biden, too, has asked his Education and Justice departments to examine how much federal student debt he can forgive. White House chief of staff Ron Klain offhandedly mentioned the legal review this month after Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren continued to needle Biden to cancel $50,000 of student debt per person. Biden had previously pledged $10,000.
Biden’s due diligence is to ensure his executive authority would be upheld if challenged in court, John Hudak, the Brookings Institution Center for Effective Public Management’s deputy director, told the Washington Examiner.
Heading into the next 100 days and beyond, Hudak expects Biden to wield his pen to take pro-environment executive action. Biden announced last week that the United States would try to cut the country’s 2005 greenhouse gas pollution levels by 50% to 52% by 2030 to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.
“We’ll likely also see this on issues of healthcare, whether it’s healthcare coverage or public health issues, as well as we move out of the pandemic and face whatever future challenges we will,” Hudak said.
Biden was criticized for appearing to kowtow to the healthcare industry this week by not lowering the Medicare eligibility age or negotiating cheaper prescription drug prices as part of his $1.8 trillion “American Families Plan.” He unveiled the social welfare package in person during his address to a joint session of Congress on Wednesday.
On top of his social welfare package and healthcare ideas, Biden implored Congress on Wednesday to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act and rethink immigration. Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was found guilty of second-degree murder last week in relation to Floyd’s death, creating momentum behind the bill.
Biden is restricted regarding policing reform, except with respect to federal agencies. The Justice Department, for example, can launch investigations into police departments suspected of civil rights violations, such as the investigations in Minneapolis and Louisville, Kentucky.
Trump, however, proved just how powerful the bully pulpit can be in terms of immigration, according to Hudak.
“Legislative reform in immigration is ideal, but in the absence of that, there’s certainly steps that the president can take,” Hudak said
Gun control and voter access are two other policy areas that constitutionally fall out of Biden’s executive reach yet remain high on his “to do” list.
Biden was scrutinized this month for timid gun control orders, which targeted “ghost guns,” encouraged “red flag” legislation, and nominated anti-gun activist David Chipman to head the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.
But Attorney General Merrick Garland’s experience as a federal appeals court judge could help Biden push “that constitutional line” and see where this Supreme Court rests, Hudak said. Elections are mostly managed by states, he added.
Yet Costas Panagopoulos, Northeastern University political science chairman and American Politics Research editor, warned Biden against being heavy-handed with the pen.
“Some of these policies reflect promises or priorities Biden articulated during the 2020 campaign. He wants to deliver or as many promises as possible, but he is walking a fine line between shoehorning costly programs and alienating moderates and fiscal conservatives,” he said.
The 46th chief executive will again need big numbers of centrist votes again if he, or another Democratic nominee, hopes to keep both chambers in their party’s control next November and then the White House two years later.
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Panagopoulos went on: “There are considerable risks involved because, if voters start to view him unfavorably for a few of these items, it could bleed into broader impressions of his performance and support for subsequent initiatives.”
