Government

With Biden In White House, GOP Discovers That Executive Orders Are Bad Actually

If it weren't for bad faith, they'd have no faith at all.

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(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty)

In the wake of dozens of executive orders from President Biden, the Unitary Executive Theory party is begging for a little unity. How very dare the new president exercise the power they themselves enshrined as gospel over the past four decades!

We are old enough to remember when the president governed by using a Sharpie and Twitterphone to declare an emergency so he could seize congressionally allocated military funds to build a border wall — a massive usurpation of Congress’s spending power that provoked nary a whisper on the right. Because we are exactly two years old.

And if memory serves, there was a time when it was perfectly acceptable for the White House to freeze the defense allocation to an Eastern European ally whose leader wouldn’t knuckle under pressure to announce an investigation of a presidential candidate.

But those days are over. And while Sen. Blackburn suffers from regular bouts of Constitution, How Does It Go?, she’s hardly the only politician inventing new standards for presidential conduct with a Democrat in the White House. Now the president’s job is to tie his own hands behind his back and work with congress in the name of “unity.”

“The scale of Joe Biden’s executive orders and their impact on Americans is stark,” tweeted Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). “The president preached unity from the inaugural stand, yet he signed an immigration EO in the Oval Office that would put American workers last.”

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“President Biden’s inaugural address focused heavily on unity, bringing the nation together after the division we’ve experienced,” sniffed Rep. Kat Cammack (R-FL). “The new EOs he just signed, however, cater to the Left, ignoring the steps necessary to move America forward.”

“President Biden’s blitz of divisive unilateral executive actions yesterday directly conflict with his rhetoric about the need to unify the country,” tweeted Rep. Andy Barr (R-KY), complaining at length about “these executive orders and proposals — bypassing Congress.”

“We face significant challenges that require bipartisan responses. Today’s Executive Orders reverse important policies and impose significant economic cost that will imperil our recovery,” House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) complained.

She’s so close to getting it!

Here on Planet Earth, many of those “important policies” which got reversed were themselves unilateral impositions of the previous president. The ban on transgender people serving in the military wasn’t a “bipartisan response.” Ditto the Keystone XL pipeline permit, or the shutdown of racial bias training in all federal workplaces. Biden’s unilateral return to the Paris Climate Agreement and the World Health Organization is exactly as bipartisan as Trump’s pullout.

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Which is to say that the previous occupant of the Oval Office exercised his constitutional authority to run the executive branch as he saw fit, as will his successor. And it’s clanging hypocrisy for the party that banged that unitary executive drum all these years to decry the very use of presidential authority they themselves supported.

They wanted a president who could fire inspectors general and FBI directors and Senate-confirmed agency heads at will, all while turning the ship of state on a dime. And now they’re complaining because they’ve got one.

Cue the tiny, tiny violins.

The GOP’s oversimplified pushback on Biden’s executive actions [WaPo]
GOP Lawmakers Decry Joe Biden’s Executive Orders in Swift Bipartisan Split [Newsweek]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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