As Biden Governs by Executive Fiat, States and Courts Begin Resisting
As Biden Governs by Executive Fiat, States and Courts Begin Resisting

By Brian Cates

Commentary

The newly installed Biden administration made it clear during its first month in power that it doesn’t expect to get much of its progressive agenda passed legislatively through the U.S. Congress.

Instead of working with lawmakers in the House and Senate to introduce new bills to enact his agenda, President Joe Biden unleashed a tidal wave of executive actions and orders, setting a historical precedent by signing 25 orders in just nine days, from Jan. 20 to Jan. 28. He also signed eight executive memorandums in that period, which are official directions made to the federal government.

Continuing into the month of February, Biden has gone on to sign another five executive orders, bringing his total since taking the oath of office to 30.

That’s an astonishing and unprecedented exercise of executive power. The previous six presidents had signed a combined total of 22 executive orders in their first months in office.

According to The Western Journal:

“According to the Federal Register, Donald Trump issued seven executive orders in January 2017, Barack Obama issued nine in January 2009, George W. Bush issued two in January 2001, Bill Clinton issued two in January 1993, George H.W. Bush issued one in January 1989, and Ronald Reagan issued one in January 1981.”

Biden Bypassing Congress?

It appears Biden is just dispensing with Congress altogether and is going to attempt to govern the country by executive fiat. I believe one of the main reasons for this is that the expected “blue wave” for Democrats failed to materialize this past November. Had Democrats increased their control of the House, Biden very likely would be pursuing a path through the Congress.

Expecting to pick up a slew of seats in the House, the Democrats instead lost 12 seats, and the party’s control of the House chamber has now been reduced to a mere 10 votes, 221 Democrats to 211 Republicans. At the end of the previous Congress, Democrats had held a commanding 233–195 lead of 38 seats.

Biden doesn’t seem to feel confident he can get his agenda passed through the Congress, especially since the more the nation finds out what his agenda actually is, the more unpopular it becomes.

This was always the key weakness in the strategy the Democratic Party decided to pursue—installing an elderly, frail president through what appears to have been election-rigging and fraud, and then trying to manufacture the illusion of widespread popular support for him after the fact.

You must have popular support in the Congress to get your agenda through both of the chambers. And it’s becoming evident just after one brief month that the national popular support for the radical Biden agenda doesn’t exist.

You can loudly boast that you have an overwhelming mandate because supposedly 81 million Americans voted for you, but putting that claim to the test by placing your mandate in the hands of the U.S. Congress is another matter.

Biden choosing to go the executive order route thus far seems to show he has no assurance of getting bills successfully passed by an increasingly vulnerable Democrat House majority.

The Weaknesses of the Executive Fiat Strategy

The good news is that the next Republican president will be able to reverse what Biden has done with these executive orders and executive actions thus far.

Former President Barack Obama famously boasted after Democrats lost control of the House in the 2010 midterm elections that he’d just use his pen and his phone to enforce his agenda on the country, bypassing the Congress completely.

But it was exactly this reliance on his pen and his phone that made Obama’s impact on the federal government transitory and so easily reversed when Donald J. Trump replaced him.

And now Biden is making the exact same mistake.

So one of the big weaknesses of trying to govern by executive fiat is that the next person can easily reverse much of what you did.

A second major weakness is that even your executive actions and orders must past constitutional muster in the federal courts. Many of Obama’s failed to meet that test, though you didn’t often hear about it. It will be the same for Biden.

Obama was blocked by the courts on what he wanted to do far more than most people realize. The big corporate media outlets didn’t see any value in focusing national attention on the Obama White House’s court defeats. And that was before Trump added more than 300 judges to the federal bench, including three to the Supreme Court.

This time around as the “election-fortifying cabal” that installed Biden in office attempts to follow the Obama pen and phone strategy, they’re going to find it much tougher going than it was back in 2008–2016 when it comes to bypassing the Congress.

As with Obama, a lot of the corporate media complex won’t be much interested in focusing on the Biden White House’s defeats and setbacks in the federal courts.

Biden Will Face Organized Resistance That Obama Didn’t

While much of the right-leaning media is endlessly wringing its hands over Biden’s executive actions, the good news is that a coalition of states and federal courts are already moving to block him. This will be where Trump’s 300+ federal judges are going to pay off.

When the Health and Human Services Department attempted to implement a new nationwide mandate to force doctors to perform sex-reassignment surgery despite any religious or ethical objections they might have had to participating in such procedures, a federal judge quickly blocked it.

U.S. District Court Chief Judge Peter D. Welte ruled that such a mandate coercing doctors to participate in sex-change operations was a violation of their First Amendment rights.

A Deliberate Attempt to Destroy Girls’ Sports

An early Biden executive order that has already inspired organized resistance in multiple states and is going to face numerous court challenges was the one that mandated that biological males who identify as girls must be allowed to fully participate in girls’ sports.

A biological male is physically different from a female. That’s not mere opinion; that’s the science. And if biological males can engage in direct sports competition with biological females, the males will have a distinctly unfair advantage. This has already been proven in a number of cases in several states that already are allowing this kind of absurdity to take place.

The advocates of this lunacy are very zealous. They understand this new mandate means the death of girls’ sports, but they say it can’t be helped. The ruination of girls’ sports is just another one of the sacrifices the country will just have to make in the name of “social justice” and “progress.”

But in their zealotry to destroy girls’ sporting programs across the nation, these advocates are provoking a backlash. Multiple states are already taking actions to protect girls’ athletic programs.

What effort the Biden administration will take to try to force these states to comply with his executive order remains to be seen.

Biden’s order to allow boys to compete with girls is far from the only one that is being challenged in the states and in the courts. His order to halt deportations of illegal aliens was also quickly blocked in federal court.

As time passes, I believe it’s going to become even more obvious that there’s no popular support for the radical Biden agenda for this country. And as he continues to try to force the changes he wants on the nation via executive fiat, his administration is going to end up under siege as more states and more courts resist what he’s trying to do.

After four years of mainstream media insisting Trump was acting like a dictator, the country will now get to see what a real out-of-control chief executive looks like.

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