Like Rodney Dangerfield in his 1980s hit “Easy Money,” President Joe Biden is sporting “the regular guy look.”
One day he’s clad in jeans on the White House lawn surveying Valentine’s Day yard signs with “Dr.” Jill Biden and his dogs. Then we’re getting reports — from CNN and Newsweek, not People and Us magazines – about the 46th president personally tossing logs on the fire or winning at Mario Kart.
But those mere distractions divert attention from the fact that Biden, who sold himself to the voters as being as ingrained in the norms of government as a termite in the woodwork of one of Bob Vila’s old houses, is proving just as destructive to our government as those termites.
When last we checked, Biden had signed 52 executive orders in less than three weeks in office.
Meanwhile, the one law he has enacted since taking office – signed on his second day – gave Biden the authority to do something that even the liberals at New York magazine lamented “repeats one of President (Donald) Trump’s most dangerous assaults on democratic norms.” It authorized a waiver allowing Biden to hire retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin to serve as defense secretary.
Now, at National Review, writers Ilya Shapiro and William Yeatman have identified other constitutional tripwires Biden is bulldozing.
It’s part of his “firing spree,” they say.
“Biden’s firing decisions evoke his predecessor’s style in their disregard for long-established precedent,” they wrote. “Beyond busting norms, these dismissals might signal a major shift in the president’s relationship with the administrative state.”
On his first day, Biden fired Peter Robb, “the first-ever general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board to be fired,” Shapiro and Yeatman noted. With that move, Biden overturned “70 years of bipartisan tradition.”
“Robb’s isn’t the only dismissal to raise eyebrows,” the authors point out.
“More recently, the Biden administration fired four conservatives before the expiration of their three-year stints on the Council of the Administrative Conference of the United States, an advisory body of regulatory experts. Two Trump appointees were summarily dismissed before the end of their six-year terms on the National Capital Planning Commission, which regulates the development of federal property in the District of Columbia. All ten members of the Federal Services Impasse Panel, which resolves disputes between federal agencies and their unionized employees, were also replaced.”
In addition, Biden will force out 56 U.S. attorneys appointed by former President Donald Trump. While not unusual – President Bill Clinton fired all 93 U.S. attorneys when he took over – the order came down “sooner than normal,” according to Shapiro and Yeatman.
The authors added, “As a legal matter, these firings are controversial because they involve offices widely thought to be ‘independent,’ … which basically means that those officials can disagree with the president without losing their job.”
Yet, “Biden is now pushing the envelope of the president’s management authority. The cosmic irony is that this is about the only Trump initiative the Biden administration hasn’t reversed.”
So, we have the “regular guy” presiding over the “irregular order” of conducting government business.
But don’t worry, Trump was Hitler.