Trump's first week: Congress, courts consider their "checks and balances"
President Donald Trump descended on Washington last week weathering a cold front that pushed his inauguration indoors. But the winter winds were no match for the flurry of executive orders, pardons, and pens he let fly. Mr. Trump swept away Biden administration policies with each jagged stroke.
To many in Washington, it seems like history is unfolding before us. "Absolutely," said presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, executive director of the George Washington Presidential Library in Mount Vernon, Va. "The thing that's really interesting about studying history is when people are living through historic moments, they know it.
"There's no doubt that seeing a president come back after being defeated in an election, that's only happened one other time, and came back after being indicted on dozens of felony charges, and was involved in an insurrection to overthrow the previous election. These are just not things we've seen before," Chervinsky said. "And so, there's no doubt that we are living in a historic moment."
On his first day in office, Mr. Trump pardoned some 1,500 January 6th defendants, and broke the record for signing executive orders, issuing even more in the days that followed.
- A "revisionist myth": Judges lambast Trump's pardons and dismissal of cases against Jan. 6 defendants
- Jan. 6 defendants freed, one wants retribution
- Fears grow that Trump's Jan. 6 pardons might embolden extremists
- Brian Sicknick's family speaks out about Jan. 6 pardons, calls it an "undoing of justice"
They range from re-naming the Gulf of Mexico … to ending diversity efforts in the federal workforce … to exiting the Paris climate accords and the World Health Organization … and reinstating anti-abortion policies from his first term. He has also tried to upend the constitutional right to citizenship for all children born on American soil. But a federal judge already put that change on hold.
- Judge calls Trump's birthright citizenship executive order "blatantly unconstitutional"
- More than 20 states sue Trump administration over order seeking to overturn birthright citizenship
- Trump doesn't only want to end DEI. He's also voiding a Civil Rights-era anti-discrimination rule
- U.S Air Force removes course that included videos of Tuskegee Airmen, female WWII pilots
- Trump Justice Dept. limits enforcement of FACE Act, which protects reproductive health facilities
- Trump allows immigration officials to revoke legal status of some migrants
- Trump administration weighs sending 10,000 troops to border, using bases to hold migrants
- Trump ally says first 100 days will be "shock and awe" ("Sunday Morning")
Chervinsky said, "We are in a system that has separation of powers. There are supposed to be checks and balances. And it is essential that both Congress and the court do their job to check the president, as the president checks them. That is how the system was designed to work. And I think that should give Americans comfort that they occasionally still want to actually do that role."
Executive orders have often been pivotal, and controversial. Think of Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, or FDR's funding of the Manhattan Project, and his internment of Japanese Americans in 1942. Recall Eisenhower's deployment of troops to desegregate Southern schools, and Kennedy's creation of the Peace Corps.
In the past decade, there has been a back-and-forth, with Obama, Trump and Biden reversing each other's policies.
- Trump reverses Obama-era ban on import of elephant trophies from Zimbabwe
- Trump rolls back Obama's clean-energy plan that caused problems for the coal industry
- Biden moves to reverse Trump's immigration agenda, pausing deportations and safeguarding DACA
- Biden revokes Trump's ban on transgender Americans serving in the military
- Trump overturns Biden-era sanctions on Israeli settlers in the West Bank
Chervinsky said, "When a president needs to use executive orders to get most of their agenda done, it means either that the agenda is not particularly popular, or it is a reflection of the ills in our current political system. Congress doesn't do much. They don't pass that much legislation. They're kind of a broken institution. So, what we see is that a president is trying to go around that. And until Congress tells them not to, they're going to continue doing it.
"There have always been periods of fighting, to be sure," Chervinsky said. "American politics is messy."
"You've even called it 'vicious,'" I said
"That would be an accurate description!" Chervinsky laughed.
It all recalls Benjamin Franklin's answer when asked whether America was a monarchy or a republic. Franklin said, "A republic, if you can keep it."
I said, "We've been through all of this in the past, and here we are today, carrying on."
"So far!" Chervinsky laughed. "One of the things that's great about history is it reminds us that we can be in really bad periods but come out of it. What I think about our current moment perhaps is different is that we have forgotten that nothing is absolute and nothing is permanent.
"The founding generation, they had skin in the game because they had fought in the war, or they had been in Congress when this government was founded. And so, no matter how terrible it was, they never wanted to throw it out completely, because they had tried to build this thing from scratch.
"I think a lot of Americans today take for granted that we will always be here," Chervinsky said.
For more info:
- "Making the Presidency: John Adams and the Precedents That Forged the Republic" by Lindsay M. Chervinsky (Oxford University Press), in Hardcover, eBook and Audio formats, available via Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Bookshop.org
- lindsaychervinsky.com
Story produced by Ed Forgotson. Editor: Ed Givnish.
