The Biden administration’s first 10 days yielded some executive actions that suggest more green agenda and war, but less civil liberties.
February 1, 2021
By: Bobby Casey, Managing Director GWP
People aren’t wrong when they liken executive orders as “dictatorial”. They are. They circumvent the legislative process, they aren’t laws, and they are basically the edicts of one person.
One individual who openly agreed with this assessment back in October 2020 was none other than one candidate Joe Biden. In an interview with George Stephanopoulos, he was asked about raising taxes by executive order. To which Biden said, no. He would need the votes. He elaborated saying:
Things you can’t do by executive order unless you’re a dictator. We’re a democracy. We need consensus.
Fact-checkers will say he was specifically referring to taxes, not executive orders in general. And it would seem now President Biden is operating on that very loophole.
In President Trump’s first 100 days, he signed 24 executive orders, 22 presidential memoranda, 20 presidential proclamations, and 28 bills. Joe Biden has taken 42 executive actions in ten days. That puts him nearly at the 50% mark in only 20% of the time.
The problem with executive orders is multi fold.
It lets congress off the hook. Congress has been the shadowy, albeit cowardly, figure in the back that keeps getting reelected, while the executive plays the heavy. How did the US manage to get into wars for the past eighty years? They certainly have not declared war since World War 2.
How is it that the US currency is so debased when congress is responsible for coining money? Simple: they outsourced it to the Federal Reserve.
How is it that the House is responsible for the budget? Yet the US is $27+ trillion in debt. Presidents usually take the heat for that, but should they?
If congress is just passing these long, unread omnibus bills, while outsourcing the rest of their constitutional responsibilities, then that is one of the major flaws in the system.
Oddly enough, relief for those still reeling from 2020 were not really part of that first ten day priority. Let’s see what was!
1. Getting back into the Paris Accord was super urgent. Was it though? And for whom? It’s a global wealth redistribution measure that lines the pockets of corrupt leaders in developing countries at the expense of those who already are leading the charge in good environmental stewardship.
The US, despite leaving the Paris Accord under President Trump, still made the greatest strides in reducing pollutants per capita. Forbes reported findings from the U.N.’s Emissions Gap Report 2020:
The U.S. still contributes the most greenhouse gas emissions per capita in the world, but, over the last decade, the country’s GHG emissions have been in decline (0.4 per cent per year).“ Greenhouse gas emissions per capita in the U.S. are dropping precipitously while those of China, India and Russia continue to rise.
Yet, it was most urgent to get the US back into it? Why?
2. One of the biggest issues is foreign policy. The wars will not slow down, as several of his executive orders call to “reevaluate” Trump’s withdrawals from places like Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria.
Iraq has made it clear they don’t want the US there, so what’s there to “reevaluate”? I don’t know. But one of the biggest attacks by ISIS in the last 3 years happened on Biden’s inauguration day. Without getting too foil-hat on this matter, imagine if you were hiding in your house waiting for this intruder to leave, and they were on their way out… would you just throw dishes on the floor to get their attention again?
With regard to Afghanistan, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the goal is “to end this so-called forever war [but also] retain some capacity to deal with any resurgence of terrorism, which is what brought us there in the first place.“
Of course, Joe Biden was very vocal about his disagreement with Trump regarding the draw down in Syria, so they will inevitably be staying.
Many of his appointments are very hawkish on the foreign policy front, and Antony Blinken is no exception. Zerohedge shared an article by Kit Knightly who described these three appointments thusly:
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Antony Blinken: an inveterate US Imperialist, arguing for every US military intervention since the 1990s, and criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw from Syria.
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Victoria Nuland: a neocon warmonger and one of the masterminds of the Maidan coup in Ukraine in 2014. She is married to Robert Kagan, another neocon warmonger, co-founder of the Project for a New American Century and senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and one of the masterminds behind the 2003 invasion of Iraq.
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General Lloyd Austin: He’s a career soldier who retired from the military in 2016 to join the board of Raytheon Technologies, an arms manufacturer and military contractor.
3. Civil liberties won’t see any love from this Democratic president either. We talked about the Domestic Terrorism bill being considered in congress, but what about the “Executive Order on Promoting COVID-19 Safety in Domestic and International Travel”, which reads in part:
International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis. Consistent with applicable law, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of HHS, and the Secretary of Homeland Security (including through the Administrator of the TSA), in coordination with any relevant international organizations, shall assess the feasibility of linking COVID-19 vaccination to International Certificates of Vaccination or Prophylaxis (ICVP) and producing electronic versions of ICVPs.
In April of last year, Anthony Fauci talked about the need for Americans to carry “immunity cards” in the future. Any concerns from the right on needing these special papers was of course dismissed as misinformation from a bunch of conspiracy theorists.
Yet, here we are looking at an executive order seeking to get the US to that very place. I’m yet unsure how this looks, gets implemented, or gets enforced. I have my doubts about the viability of such a policy that doesn’t raise considerable red flags by civil liberty and privacy advocates.
For a man who struggles to construct sentences on his own on his most lucid day, I’d be shocked if he is reading half the stuff he’s signing. They aren’t all ominous, but there are a few zingers in there that have me wary.
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