President-elect Joe Biden has his own ideas and agenda, but it will be his relationships with Republicans on his right and progressives on his left that define his presidency. And he’s already feeling the pressure.
We can see the tension between Biden’s instincts — which often lean toward caution and conciliation — and what the Democratic Party’s base is seeking from him in an online meeting he and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris had with a group of civil rights leaders this week. Audio of the meeting was leaked to Ryan Grim of the Intercept.
In it, Biden pushed back against the desire of many on the left for an immediate and ambitious set of executive actions that would not only undo what President Donald Trump has done but also go much further in advancing progressive goals.
“I will use it to undo every single damn thing this guy has done by executive authority,” Biden said, “but I’m not going to exercise executive authority where it’s a question.” He raised as an example trying to outlaw assault weapons by executive order, raising the specter of a future Republican president who would follow his lead and allow everyone to have an automatic rifle: “So we gotta be careful.”
On the most basic level, what Biden is arguing is obvious: He can’t do things that are illegal or unconstitutional. But when Biden says, “I’m not going to exercise executive authority where it’s a question,” he seems to be saying that he’d shy away from even close calls on the limits of his authority.
Independent reporting for Pine Bluff & Jefferson County since 1879.
But there’s a large body of potential executive action that is neither clearly within the president’s authority nor clearly outside it. And that’s where Biden’s approach is uncertain. Will he sign a few executive orders undoing egregious Trump initiatives but focus mostly on standing up a competent administration (for a change)? Or will he try to push the envelope, moving boldly into areas where limits on the president’s power are less than clear?
Trump’s approach was always to go ahead and give any of his whims a shot, then see if he could get support in the courts. Sometimes they shot him down, but not always. Yet Biden is in a different position than Trump, for one important reason: Questions about the limits of executive authority will ultimately be decided by the Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative supermajority.
And while in the past many of the court’s conservatives have had expansive views of presidential power, they’re less inclined to grant it to a Democratic president. You could argue that the Biden administration should just throw everything it can at the courts, even actions of dubious legality, and hope to win as much as it can. But that’s not Biden’s style.
Nevertheless, executive authority may be all Biden has. If Democrats don’t win both Senate runoff elections in Georgia, Republicans will retain control of the chamber and shut legislation down completely. They may not even allow Biden’s Cabinet and sub-Cabinet nominees to be confirmed; they’re already threatening to refuse to give hearings to those nominees before the inauguration, which nominees traditionally get. That’s in addition to the fact that Majority Leader Mitch McConnell may refuse to allow Biden to fill any judicial vacancy for four years.
Which means that executive actions will be a major arena of conflict between the administration and the party’s activist base, as the base tries to convince Biden to be more aggressive and he resists, falling back on his less ambitious instincts.
Nevertheless, we shouldn’t forget that there’s nothing wrong with that. Some will say (as they already have), “Why are these liberals giving Biden such a hard time? He’s already done a lot for them!” But giving a Democratic president a hard time is their job.
That’s how they get more of what they want: They put pressure on the president to move from where he is to where they are, trying to convince him not just that it’s the right thing to do but that there will be a political cost to refusing them. That’s how politics works.
But as this tape shows, as receptive as Biden might be to the arguments activists are making, he won’t get there on his own. They’re going to have to keep pushing him.