President-elect Joe Biden is readying a stack of executive orders to sign after he’s sworn into office, and it has some Republicans experiencing déjà vu.
Like former President Barack Obama before him, Biden is poised to rely on unilateral action as he faces the prospect of a recalcitrant Senate. On top of a possible Republican-controlled Senate, Biden has to grapple with tensions within his own party as well. Far-left lawmakers, for instance, are set to push him on policy, despite a slimmer Democratic majority in the House.
Incoming White House chief of staff Ron Klain has already listed some of Biden’s priorities. They include reintroducing protections for “Dreamers” brought to the country illegally as children and a slew of environmental regulations.
Biden would also ensure the United States rejoined the Paris agreement and the World Health Organization, Klain told MSNBC. He would roll back the travel restrictions President Trump placed on a handful of majority-Muslim countries. And fix “some of the flaws in the Affordable Care Act that the Trump administration has imposed,” Klain said.
Biden’s COVID-19 response plan and broader immigration reforms were on top of his to-do list too, according to Klain.
“He’s getting ready for that now during the transition. We’re going to deliver on that starting on Jan. 20,” he said.
Biden’s embrace of direct authority is a pivot from the Democratic primary. During the primary, the two-term vice president and 36-year Delaware senator, who prides himself on being a dealmaker, boohooed the measures, sometimes perceived as heavy-handed because they don’t require consensus. They can also be easily reversed by the succeeding Oval Office occupant.
He reiterated the sentiment last week when asked by reporters about COVID-19 economic relief negotiations in Wilmington, Delaware.
“I’d issue executive orders that are totally within the purview of an executive,” he promised.
That was echoed by his transition team, such as the next White House communications director Kate Bedingfield. Bedingfield pointed to Biden’s 100-day mask mandate in federal buildings and on airplanes, buses, and other forms of interstate transportation, where he has jurisdiction, as another example.
Biden’s initial reliance on unilateral action may trigger Republicans after Obama famously said, “I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone,” during his first Cabinet meeting in 2014 ahead of an economy-focused State of the Union address and public relations pressure campaign that year. It followed his 2012 “We can’t wait” initiative, which had similar economic objectives.
For Mark Rozell, dean of George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, it was natural for Biden to “want to undo some of what he considers the damage created by his predecessor’s executive orders.” Rozell, though, understood the other side of the argument expressed by those worries about monarch-like unfettered power. Concerns, too, surround whether Biden’s mandate has been weakened by Trump’s refusal to accept the Nov. 3 election’s results given 74 million people still voted for him.
“I would feel differently if Biden campaigned against excessive executive orders and then he followed a fellow Democratic president and proceeded to issue a flurry of new executive orders,” Rozell told the Washington Examiner.
Northeastern University’s political science chairman, Costas Panagopoulos, added presidential candidates frequently used direct authority as a political punching bag.
But sometimes, as presidents, “It is their best, or only realistic, option,” Panagopoulos said.
“Biden would balance his antipathy for executive orders against inaction and may conclude doing something is better than nothing at all,” Panagopoulos continued.
Middlebury College political science professor Bertram Johnson expected Biden to avoid some of the unilateral authority exercised by Trump, yet noted the trend toward wielding executive strength “transcends individual presidencies.”
“Each party complains when the other party does it, but the truth is that until Congress is less bitterly divided, it’s tempting for presidents to stretch the limits of their powers,” he said.
For all the criticism Republicans have leveled at Obama and Biden for their expansive interpretation of Article II of the Constitution, Trump has been just as assertive in the White House.
American Action Network, a conservative advocacy group, found during the summer Trump was tracking to leverage direct authority more than the three previous administrations.
Obama relied on executive orders, determinations, memorandums, notices, proclamations, and presidential orders 2,132 times over the course of his two terms, according to Federal Registrar data. If Trump had continued at his own pace for eight years, he would have taken unilateral steps 2,136 times, the American Action Network found.
The American Presidency Project compiled its information slightly differently. That organization found Obama had issued 276 executive orders over eight years, averaging 35 a year, while Trump had 192 as of November over almost four years, averaging 51 a year.
