If you had conversations with observant people about what they expected a potential President Biden would do right off the proverbial bat, you no doubt hit on the subject of Executive Orders. After all, if Biden is sworn in, he can’t count on the House and Senate backing every idea that’s been fermenting behind his aviator shades.
And, already, your prescience is being proven, because that’s precisely what Biden’s “team” is spreading: plans for lots and lots of executive orders, and the so-called “reporters” at the Washington Post are lapping them up.
In a piece that didn’t seem so challenging that it would require three people to write, Matt Viser, Seung Min Kim, Annie Linskey of the WAPO tell us:
President-elect Joe Biden is planning to quickly sign a series of executive orders after being sworn into office on Jan. 20, immediately forecasting that the country’s politics have shifted and that his presidency will be guided by radically different priorities.
And isn’t it nice to see them claim not only that Biden is officially the "president-elect" (he's not), but that “the country’s politics” have changed. I don’t feel any different, do you? I guess we just automatically “change” according to who prematurely claims victory in a presidential election. That’s collectivism for you. His politics are your politics.
Specifically, one of Biden’s highest profile targets is Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Accords, those being a set of catastrophically burdensome so-called “regulations” that Barack Obama loved, but never signed as a treaty, an accord to supposedly “curb greenhouse gas emission” that was never approved by the Senate, but which Obama wanted to implement, none the less.
Of course, those “greenhouse gas emissions” have not been proven to significantly drive global temperatures, and even if they had been, the US free market is designed to reward energy efficiency, so, as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo noted when the Trump Administration first announced the planned departure:
U.S. emissions of criteria air pollutants that impact human health and the environment declined by 74% between 1970 and 2018. U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions dropped 13% from 2005-2017, even as our economy grew over 19 percent.
Ironically, Trump’s exit from the Paris Accord was only official on November 4, the day after the so-called election.
The Wapo triumvirate also tells us more about Biden’s planned Executive Orders:
(H)e will reverse President Trump’s withdrawal from the World Health Organization. He will repeal the ban on almost all travel from some Muslim-majority countries, and he will reinstate the program allowing “dreamers,” who were brought to the United States illegally as children, to remain in the country, according to people familiar with his plans.
What a curious thing to read, that statement about the World Health Organization, since, when Trump announced his withdrawal from it in April, many Americans realized there was nothing in the U.S. Constitution that allowed the federal government to fund it in the first place.
But, don’t bother looking at the Constitution, nor at the fact that the original use for Executive Orders was to handle small, internal operations of the Executive Branch, like moving an office, or a guard. The fact that Executive Orders can touch on things ranging from what we use to heat our homes to whether our tax money will be used to fund international health bureaucrats – that’s a glaring sign that the federal government has assigned the Executive Branch projects and powers the central government was never designed to consider, let alone engage.
But the WaPo writers seem blissfully unaware of that. In fact, they triumphantly depict the Trump moves as “undermining established norms and institutions,” while Biden’s plans to engage in his own Executive Orders to restore the towering bureaucratic walls are, somehow, restoring “the established order.”
Although transitions of power can always include abrupt changes, the shift from Trump to Biden — from one president who sought to undermine established norms and institutions to another who has vowed to restore the established order — will be among the most startling in American history.
And you can bet that Biden will be giving serious consideration to following Trump’s erroneous Executive Order banning so-called “bump-stocks,” expanding the field of banned firearms items and practices – moves that would stand contrary to the Second Amendment, but which, of course, we can expect the lemmings at the WaPo to applaud.
He has also said he would send a bill to Congress repealing liability protections for gun manufacturers, and close background-check loopholes. He has pledged to repeal the Republican-passed tax cuts from 2017, an effort that could be stymied if Republicans hold the Senate majority.
One likely can add to that list a federal Red Flag proposal or Executive Order, as well as magazine bans and other threats to innocent gun owners, threats that don’t stop criminally minded thugs from getting the weapons they want.
But it’s all just hunky dory to the writers of the WAPO, it seems -- all just “getting things back to established norms,” and the norms are so “normie” for them, they appear excited to see “Mask Mandate” Biden say he’s going to establish a Coronavirus Task Force, with none other than former Clinton FDA head David Kessler on it.
That would be Kessler, the former guru of an agency that is not enumerated within the Constitution, the guy who was intimately involved with a move to try to restrict access to dietary vitamins and supplements in the ‘90s.
Because, yeah, that’s really constitutional and peaceful. Sure.
God help us, please.
But, hey, if one tries hard enough, and embraces the Washington Post mindset with all the vigor and gusto one can muster, perhaps it’s possible to love Big Brother Biden.
Even as he lifts his Executive Order-shod boot to stomp your face.
(Cover Photo: Gage Skidmore)