Joseph Biden, 46th President
Today’s the Day: Joseph Biden is scheduled to be sworn in as the U.S.’ 46th President at noon Eastern Time; events surrounding the inauguration, which will have only a small live audience (200,000 anticipated visitors were replaced by 200,000 flags on the Mall), will be mostly virtual and prerecorded. Here’s a schedule if you’re keen on participating remotely. And of course, you can opt for CNN or the public affairs network, c-span.
Biden left Delaware yesterday evening for the last time before his swearing-in. The original plan was to take an Amtrak train to D.C., but this was deemed too risky given heightened security concerns, so he and his wife Jill flew on a chartered plane. It’s traditional for outgoing Presidents to send a government plane to fly the incoming President to D.C., but by now we all know the outgoing President was anything but traditional. He refused to invite Biden and his wife to the White House following the election, and he has refused to attend Biden’s inauguration – the first President in 152 years to decline to be present at his successor’s swearing-in.
Upon arriving in D.C. last evening, Biden and his wife, incoming Vice-President Kamala Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff (he’s announced he’d like to be referred to as the “Second Gentleman”) went to the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall, where 400 lights went on, each symbolizing 1,000 Covid-19-related deaths. As had been predicted by epidemiologists, the U.S. managed to pass the grim milestone of 400,000 lost to the virus before January 20. It was a visually striking moment, but the image of the two couples, entirely alone and gazing out on those 400 lights was stark and poignant, as was Biden’s departure from Wilmington, when he wept and noted that he wished it were his son Beau (who died from brain cancer in 2015) who would be assuming the Presidency. It was heart-breaking somehow, and a few commentators have proposed that Biden’s chief role, at least initially, will be that of “Griever-in-Chief” and (hopefully) “Healer-in-Chief.”
Initial Announced Actions
Biden will sign quite a few Executive Orders later today – he’s hitting the ground running, so to speak – and will, we read, petition to re-join the Paris Climate Agreement (the Paris Accord) and WHO. Among the EO’s he’s scheduled to sign: a temporary moratorium on drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve (probably this will become permanent); an end to the Keystone XL pipeline (permanent); a request to the Interior Department to review national lands the previous Administration shrank (with a view to issuing drilling and mining leases); a moratorium on eviction (of renters) and foreclosures (for those unable to make mortgage payments) until March 31 (at least; probably this will have to be extended); a continuation of the moratorium on student loan repayments until September 30; cancellation of “The Wall” (between Mexico and the southern U.S.), and a review of about 100 EO’s issued by the Trump Administration related to regulatory policies (a lot of these involve air, water, and land – so, environmental issues). Many of the latter we can anticipate will be overturned-reversed during Biden’s first 100 days.
With respect to the pandemic – Biden’s first and greatest challenge – he will be issuing a 100-day mask requirement on all federal properties/land throughout the country, and a “mask challenge” to the entire country. We have also read he’ll use the Defense Production Act to ramp up production of material and Covid-19 services (syringes, new vaccine centers, testing-and-tracing [100,000 people to serve as a national corps]). About $400 billion of the $1.9 trillion relief bill he’ll submit to Congress is earmarked for dealing with Covid-19.
Here’s something notable which may be significant, or may come to not much of anything, ultimately:
Biden will order a whole-of government “racial equity” review led by Domestic Policy Council director Susan Rice that will require each department and agency to conduct a “baseline review” of whether its policies disadvantage any demographic group. The Office of Management and Budget will also undertake a review to “more equitably allocate federal resources,” according to a summary of the action provided by Biden’s team.
“The president-elect has promised to root out systemic racism from our institutions,” Rice said. [Emphasis added]
What kind of President will Biden be?
We just don’t know at this point. His 40+ years in public office would indicate he’s a “moderate,” which means, pretty conservative. There is a lot of legislation with his name attached that has directly harmed many of the people he has now vowed to help – for example, he was instrumental in the drafting of the 2005 bankruptcy legislation that made it impossible to discharge student loan debt in bankruptcy (today, $1 trillion in such debt is outstanding).
He’s relatively hawkish in foreign affairs, but he’s extremely experienced and is well aware that it is 2021, not 1990 or 2008 – he has proven himself able to move with the times. Analysts feel he has assembled a strong foreign policy team of advisers and Cabinet-level appointees who will support him in shaping a different role for the U.S. in international affairs. (The link, which is to a piece from the Brookings Institute, does a good job explaining how he’s put together foreign policy experts belonging to two different camps – those who want to return to the cautious approach of the Obama years, and those prodding him to move forward; it will be interesting to watch how these two camps jostle for predominance in the Biden Administration’s foreign policy initiatives.)
Biden is not a hard-and-fast ideologue; he is an experienced, conventional (and gifted) politician used to working “both sides of the aisle” in the Senate (over the course of 36 years), and he made few enemies during his two terms as Obama’s Vice-President (2008-2016). He’s pragmatic, seasoned, and, we believe (hope) he will prove susceptible to pressure on issues he hasn’t shown much interest or desire to move on – Medicare for All being a case in point. Given Biden’s role in shepherding Obama’s signature legislation through Congress – the Affordable Care Act (ACA) in 2009-2010, it’s perhaps not surprising that he’s willing to expand and “beef up” the ACA, but the pandemic has demonstrated for the umpteenth time that employer-linked health insurance isn’t viable. Pressure on this issue must continue unremittingly.
One area where it looks like Biden will be strong and pro-active is climate change/the environment. His nominations to key positions are acceptable to activists, and we’re impressed by the nomination of Deb Haaland, a Native American (she belongs to the Pueblo of Laguna) Congresswoman from New Mexico, to the Department of the Interior (overseeing all federal and Tribal lands, more than 500 million acres in total), under which the Bureau of Indian Affairs falls. The appointment of Michael Regan (head of North Carolina’s Department of Environmental Quality) would suggest that environmental justice will get a fair hearing with his Administration. These were unusually good appointments, and we must thank progressive environmentalists for them – as well as Biden himself, because he actually listened to climate and environmental justice activists. The Department of the Interior and EPA are two Cabinet-level agencies to watch closely over coming weeks and months.
We’re less certain about what the nomination of Miguel Cardona (Connecticut Commissioner of Education) foretells about the Department of Education. Cardona’s stance on charter schools is not clearly understood (even by education writers), in part because he hasn’t left much of a paper trail in the year-and-a-half he’s held the office in Connecticut (Cardona is only 45 years old, and has held statewide office for a year-and-a-half). We would be satisfied, at least initially, if he were to ensure the enforcement of Title I, Title VII, and Title IX, if he proved a strong advocate for Biden’s universal pre-K proposal, and if he took a strong position on student debt repayments to shyster for-profit schools. This doesn’t sound like much, but remember that most K-12 education policy per se is set at the state level and implemented locally.
Will Biden belie the negative expectations of progressives?
Well, he’s not going to start a revolution, that’s pretty certain. On the other hand, a $15-an-hour nationwide minimum wage, an ambitious Green New Deal-like program that sets out to build a new and resilient infrastructure while creating tens of millions of jobs, environmental justice actions that can be linked with climate change ones – there are literally scores of EO’s and legislative actions that could make life appreciably better for suffering Americans.
Biden lost his first wife and infant daughter in a terrible car accident in 1972; in 2015, he lost his oldest son to brain cancer. He was profoundly affected by these tragedies, and his empathy appears (at least to us, as outside observers) to be genuine. Biden’s career – a phoenix-like one if you think about it, since he was largely written off after completing his second term as Vice-President in January 2017 – was successful but conventional; he went along to get along (which he did, extremely well – Mitch McConnell has agreed to attend church services at St. Matthews with Biden today, along with Chuck Schumer, the new Senate Majority leader, and Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House).
What remains to be seen is how the U.S.’s severely-fractured right will respond to Biden’s Presidency; a significant minority continues in the certainty that the election was stolen and President Trump was re-elected by a “landslide.” The disparate groups which rioted on January 6 and occupied Congress (QAnon, the Proud Boys, Women for America First, etc.) have revealed the rent in the fabric of conservatism (in a way, corresponding to that within the Democratic Party between progressives and moderates). The Inauguration itself, which brought 25,000 National Guard troops to Washington, D.C. to protect the Capitol and White House, is hardly an auspicious opening to what will almost certainly be a one-term Presidency.
That final detail, i.e. that Biden is 78 years old and there is almost no chance he will run again in 2024, is actually the one that gives us hope he may rise above himself over the next four years. Biden no longer has anything to fear: there will be no more campaigns, no more elections, no more losses to mourn or victories to celebrate. Somewhat to our surprise, he’s assembled a Cabinet with fewer Obama Administration holdovers than we’d expected (there are some, of course), but he’s shown he’s his own man in terms of taking staffing decisions, while still clearly listening to advisors. His Chief of Staff is his former Chief when he was Vice-President and they’ve known each other twenty years (Ron Klain, who won’t set the world on fire, but then, maybe you don’t want your Chief of Staff setting fires; rather, you want him putting fires out before they start). We sense this will be a tightly-run Administration, filled with experienced people who will offer a range of pragmatic options from among which Biden himself will choose.
It seems almost too much to ask of a 78-year-old man who’s frail and appeared exhausted and at times, confused on the campaign trail. Two parallels of elderly men who proved to be great leaders come to mind: Winston Churchill (1874-1965), who became Prime Minister (age 66) in 1941 and led Great Britain throughout World War II, and Nelson Mandela (1918-2013), who served as President of South Africa from the ages of 76 to 81 (1994-1999).
So, stranger things have happened. President-elect Biden has been in politics for almost 50 years. He has all the experience he could ever need – can he emerge into greatness and become the President the country requires amidst a pandemic, a financial and economic crisis, all the while governing a sharply-divided people?