The Daily - Biden’s Executive Orders

Episode Date: January 22, 2021

Within hours of assuming the presidency, President Biden signed a flurry of executive orders. He rejoined the Paris climate agreement, repealed the so-called Muslim travel ban and mandated the wearing of masks on federal property.The actions had a theme: They either reversed former President Donald Trump’s actions or rebuked his general policy approach.But governing by decree has a downside. We look at the potential positives of the orders and point out the pitfalls.Guest: Michael D. Shear, a White House correspondent for The New York Times. For an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. You can read the latest edition here.Background reading: Mr. Biden’s actions on Day 1 included orders on immigration, criminal justice and the climate.Here are the president’s 17 executive orders and other directives in detail.The U.S. has some catching up to do on the Paris climate agreement. Here’s an explainer on the history of the accord.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily 

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Today, in his first hours as president, Joe Biden signed a flurry of executive orders reversing the legacy of President Trump. White House reporter Mike Scheer on what's in the orders and the upside and downside of governing by executive action. It's Friday, January 22nd.

Well, this is going to be the first of many engagements we're going to have in here. Mike, I wonder if you can set the scene for us. A man, a plan, a pen. Right. So the scene is the Oval Office. This is late afternoon on the 20th. So Joe Biden has been inaugurated under high security, under threat of a pandemic. And I thought with the state of the nation today, there's no time to waste, get to work immediately.

Now he's sitting at the Resolute desk in the Oval Office. Looks very different already than President Trump. They've already redecorated a little bit. They've hung different curtains, got a different carpet. They've put up photos of Joe Biden's family, bust of Cesar Chavez behind him. So the visuals already look a little bit different than we'd come to be used to for the last four years. We're going to be signing a number of executive orders over the next

several days to week. And I'm going to start today. The compounding crisis of COVID, COVID-19, along with the economic crisis following that. Sitting next to him is a huge stack of folders with the seal of the presidency on it, each one containing a different executive order, executive action, some kind of memo that he's going to sign. And cameras are rolling. He takes one and begins to sign them. Mr. President. Thank them. Mr. President. And just as a civics reminder here,

executive orders are actions that require nothing but a presidential signature. They're kind of unique in how we govern. That's right. I mean, there's a lot that presidents have to do with others in our form of government. The Constitution was very clear. Congress controls the purse.

Congress controls spending. So there are limits on what a president can do in terms of spending money. But executive orders are actions that the president can direct the government to take on his authority alone. And my sense is that the last president, Donald Trump, made very liberal use of executive orders

in a way that was quite unpopular with Democrats. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, look, presidents turn to executive orders. They turn to the power of their office when they get stymied in other ways, when they can't work with Congress. Donald Trump obviously had a very volatile and difficult relationship with Congress. And so you saw him in all sorts of ways. He issued executive orders directing the census not to count certain

individuals, undocumented immigrants. You saw him issuing executive orders about what federal architecture should look like in Washington, D.C., because he didn't like certain buildings. You saw him shut down the border with Mexico at various times to asylum seekers. It was a kind of never-ending barrage of executive orders, big and small. Some of them had huge impacts, some of them less so, but that was essentially the way he governed. Right. And among the critics of those Trump executive orders was Joe Biden, not yet president. And the critique of the executive orders, and I remember it very vividly, was that they represent the imperial presidency, right? Government by executive fiat, no effort to work with Congress or create consensus, but just one leader's view suddenly turning into

the full force of the American government. Right. And I think for Biden, that was an especially powerful critique because that argument played into exactly the caricature of Donald Trump that we all, you know, saw over these last four years somebody who thinks he knows best and isn't interested in finding some sort of common ground. Rather, he wants to impose his view, and that's what him put into the question of how aggressively they would or should use executive orders? So I think they are mindful of the critique, especially of the sort of hypocrisy that they will be accused of given the path that they're taking. But I think they draw a distinction, or at least they give themselves a pass, But I think they draw a distinction, or at least they give themselves a pass, because their thinking in the conversations that I've had with them is that Donald Trump gave them an opening by putting in place so much of his agenda through executive orders, by not making the changes that Donald Trump wanted to make permanent through legislation, they gave the incoming administration an opportunity to move much more quickly to reverse things than would have been the case if all of these changes had been done through legislation. If Donald Trump,

for example, had made some of some big sweeping changes to immigration policy by law and had gotten a bipartisan consensus, in order to roll that back, the Biden administration would have had to do the same. Instead, they can act in the same way as the Trump administration did, only in reverse. Right. So their internal argument and rationale is he did it, so we get to do it. It's a little bit of a playground level version of government, but there is some logic to it. Well, and let's not forget, I mean, while Donald Trump was probably the most aggressive user of executive action that we've seen in the last, you know, number of presidents, he's not the first. Barack Obama used executive action pretty aggressively as well, especially

towards the end of his eight years when the Senate and the House were not in his camp. And so it's been a ping pong ball for a while. Okay, so given all that, Mike, let's talk about these executive orders that President Biden signs in the Oval Office in these opening hours of his presidency. Right. So the executive orders and various different actions that he took all sort of fell into a series of buckets. You had executive actions that the president took on COVID and the pandemic. You had another set that were largely around climate change and the environment and rolling back some of President Trump's policies there.

And then you had a third really big bucket on immigration and pushing back against President Trump's policies at the border and with enforcement inside the country. Got it. So let's start with the pandemic. What were those executive orders? So the first one is he issued an executive order that mandated the wearing of masks. Now, it wasn't a federal mandate across the country. The president does not have the power to order everybody in the country to wear masks all the time, but he does have the power to make people on federal property, federal employees wear a mask when they're on the job. So for example, you think about the post

office, right? Whenever anybody goes in there, it will now be law. You have to wear a mask. So there's both a practical impact of that. If you don't wear a mask, you're in trouble with the federal government, your boss. But there's also the symbolism of saying to the country that the government and its employees are going to lead by example when it comes to wearing masks. Absolutely. And the executive order, I think they understood the kind of limited practical impact of this order. But I think President Biden definitely understood the dramatic contrast that he was drawing with President Trump, who had so resisted to the last day, frankly, ever pressuring people or modeling for the American public the idea that a mask is an important thing to do.

And so I think the Biden administration and President Biden were thinking, look, well, let's do what we can to send that message. They also tried to do some steps to address the economic fallout from the pandemic. Obviously, there's going to be a big fight in Congress over some of the biggest economic ways that they can help people. But one thing they did do through executive order was to extend a moratorium on foreclosures and evictions,

which is aimed at helping people who might have lost their job because of the pandemic, can't pay the rent. This was a sort of bipartisan effort that had been put in place before and needed to be extended. And so the president was able to extend it with an executive order. They also, one more, they rejoined the World Health Organization, which you'll remember President Trump had pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization after concluding that he thought the World Health Organization was too friendly to China.

That was seen as a mistake, I think, frankly, all over the world by health officials. And the Biden folks made sure that was reversed on day one. Got it. Okay, let's now turn to the Biden executive orders on climate. What did he do there? Okay, let's now turn to the Biden executive orders on climate. What did he do there? So probably the best known executive order that he did was rejoining the Paris Climate Accords.

Remember, this was this global agreement that the United States had been a leader in during President Obama's time to sort of corral the nations of the world to fight climate change and to reduce emissions as a globe, as a world of nations. President Trump very famously took the United States out of the accord, basically said we're not part of this anymore in early in 2017. President Biden had long said that was a mistake. And with the stroke of a pen, we're back in. we're back in. And finally, that brings us to immigration. Look, immigration was at the heart

of what the Trump presidency was all about. He campaigned on building the wall across the southern border. He used really harsh immigration rhetoric. And so if I had to pick one area, this was where President Biden's actions on the 20th really took aim at unraveling and pushing back against Donald Trump's legacy in a really big way. We'll be right back. So Mike, describe these executive orders by Biden that started to dismantle Donald Trump's legacy on immigration.

What were they? So I think the most dramatic was probably Joe Biden's revocation of Donald Trump's Muslim travel ban. President Trump, when he was a candidate, had literally campaigned on keeping Muslims out of the country. And so when Donald Trump got into office the first week, the travel ban, he put in place a limited entry into the United States from a bunch of countries, Muslim countries, Somalia, Yemen, some other countries as well. So I think in some ways,

Joe Biden's revocation of that travel ban had both practical implications for the people in those countries who going forward will now be able to come into the United States, but it also had a really symbolic feature, which is a rejection of that kind of rhetoric that Donald Trump had sent the message that we don't want those people coming in. And I think it was important for Joe Biden to deliver the reverse message that, no, we're not a country that bans people on the basis of their ethnicity or their race or because they're from a country that we don't like. Okay, what else did Biden do via executive order on immigration? Let me tick through a couple of these.

He stopped construction of Trump's border wall. Remember, that was something that President Trump had advocated since from day one of his presidency and had fought with Congress for the money to do it and ultimately managed to get various pots of money to construct about 200 or 300 miles worth of border wall along the southern border. President Biden said, you know what, we're going to stop construction. We want to look at whether or not the money that

President Trump used for construction was legal and appropriate and whether or not they want to look into the contracts that were signed with companies to build the wall. And so that's paused. He also repealed one of the most controversial executive orders that President Trump had issued was one on what they call interior enforcement, which is essentially directing the immigration agents throughout the country, not necessarily on the border, but in the rest of the country, to be more aggressive, to find and deport any immigrant

that is undocumented, that doesn't have the valid papers to be in the United States, even if those people aren't violent, even if they've only committed a misdemeanor. You know, essentially, that had been a kind of effort by the Trump administration to really get aggressive on deporting and kicking people out of the country. And the Biden executive order on Wednesday will reverse that, will essentially go back to a policy in which immigration agents have more of a sense of prioritization. You know, we're going to go after the real bad guys, but we're not going to spend a lot of time going after people who aren't hardened criminals. Mike, the unmistakable theme here,

and you've talked about it throughout this conversation, is that these executive orders, most of them, they either reverse President Trump's actions or they rebuke his policy approach. So given that, how did these executive orders from Biden on day one, how do they fit with his message from that inaugural stage of unity.

We talked to our colleague yesterday, Asad Herndon, about how deeply Joe Biden believes in bipartisanship and working with Republicans. And that was the absolute core of his message. And so is signing these executive orders in conflict with that? And I ask that because several Republicans certainly see it that way.

Yeah, so look, I think you can look at that question through two different lenses, one philosophical and one pragmatic, right? So I think from a philosophical standpoint, President Biden would say this doesn't conflict with that message because so much of the substance of what his executive orders are trying to achieve

is a rejection of the divisiveness of Donald Trump, right? So if you look at the immigration executive orders, he's trying to get the country back to a place where we're not pitting us against them, the insider against the outsider, us versus the other, right? Through that lens, you know, it is not in conflict. But I think from the pragmatic side, a lot of the last four years, a lot of Republicans liked. They might not have liked everything, but in terms of the president's economic policies,

in terms of his border security policies, there was a lot that Republicans liked. And I think that one of the things that President Biden is going to have to confront over the next, you know, 100 days, let's say, is how much does the quick pace of these executive actions and the extent to which he's trying to quickly erase the Trump legacy, how much does that leave a bad taste in the mouth of Republicans, especially in the Senate where he's got a 50-50 split? He's going to need Republicans to pass any kind of big, broad agenda. And, you know, a lot of them, as I think you hinted a minute ago, a lot of them won't see this as unity. They won't see this as unilateral and acting without the kind of consultation and cooperation and compromise that is sort of part of his shtick. And so my sense is that as he pursues this goal of repairing the soul of the nation, kind of purging the last four years of divisiveness and anger, that, you know, he will accept some cost to that. And some cost of that might be

a political cost and we'll just have to see. So I want to zoom out for just a moment to this question we started with, which is this history of presidents using executive orders over and over again and kind of where it's left us as a government. Because we now have a President Biden having reversed many of the actions of a President Trump in 24 hours. And so we've now entered a pretty clear cycle of one president using executive orders to theatrically wipe away the legacy of the last president. And is that any way to govern? You know, I covered Obama for eight years and Trump for four years. And for most of that time, we've been locked in this cycle of impermanence, right? Where everything is temporary. Everything is a sort of quick reaction to what can I do quickly

because I can't accomplish anything that's really substantive and it's really permanent. And look, the only thing that is permanent in our way of governance is if you can get a big piece of legislation passed through the House, through the Senate, with bipartisan majorities, where there's an actual consensus among the people who are our representatives and then signed by the President of the United States.

And if you can get that, that can be a permanent lasting legacy, which lasts generations. If you don't, then we're locked into what we've had now, where businesses have trouble knowing kind of what the roadmap is. The countries around the world don't know who to believe in terms of which way the United States is going, because it could go one way one day and the other way a different day. And I think that's where we are right now. Right. Just to highlight the point you made, I think of the Affordable Care Act, for example, passed into law by the House of Representatives, the United States Senate, signed into law by

President Obama. There have been dozens of efforts to repeal it, to chip away at it, to sue it out of existence. But because it's a law, it has pretty much remained with modification in place since it was passed 10 years ago. That is probably going to be true for several of the pieces of legislation that Donald Trump passed, his tax cuts, for example, or his criminal justice reform. Absolutely. I was there at the White House the night that the Affordable Care Act passed. I remember it feeling like a historic moment, a permanent moment. And I think the question for Joe Biden and the thing that he sold to voters

is that he'll get us back there. He'll get us back to a place where, for example, he submitted an immigration overhaul bill to Congress on his first day saying, you know, not only do I want to do these executive orders, but I want the Congress to come together and say, let's design a new immigration system for the country. And we'll see. I mean, you know, that's been tried for decades and the country hasn't been able to get there. But he sent it to Congress so we know that he wants a legislative solution, not just an executive order.

Right. And the question is, can he deliver it? Can he help get us past this place in American politics that we've been for, you know, these last number of years where those kinds of big things get jammed up and don't go anywhere? And if he can, then, you know, that legacy will be a whole lot longer lasting and will be much harder for the next president to unravel because it'll not just be another executive order that can be wiped away with a pen. Right. It will be law. Yeah, exactly. Thank you, Mike. We appreciate it. Sure. Happy to do it.

We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Let me be very clear. Things are going to continue to get worse before they get better. On Thursday, President Biden warned Americans that the death toll from the coronavirus would likely reach 500,000 by next month. The prediction came after the United States reported 4,367 deaths on the day of Biden's inauguration, one of the highest daily death tolls since the start of the pandemic. And the Times reports that Senator Mitch McConnell,

the Republican minority leader, plans to ask Democrats to delay the start of President Trump's impeachment trial until February to give Trump's lawyers time to prepare a defense. I don't think it's very unifying to say, oh, let's just forget it and move on. That's not how you unify. During a news conference,

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi defended the plan to pursue a trial in the Senate and rejected claims from Republicans that it would detract from Biden's calls for unity. And just because he's now gone, thank God, you don't say to a president, do whatever you want in the last months of your administration. You're going to get out of jail card free

because people think we should make nice nights and forget that people died here on January 6th. I think that would be harmful to unity. Today's episode was produced by Sidney Harper and Eric Krupke. It was edited by Lisa Chow and engineered by Chris Wood. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.