As President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris prepare to leave office at noon on Monday and President-elect Donald Trump and Vice President–elect J.D. Vance prepare to be sworn in, on the one hand last-minute orders are being made and goodbyes are being said, while on the other, the incoming administration is setting expectations.
On Thursday, Biden issued an executive order to strengthen the cyber defenses of the United States after hackers from China, Russia, and other countries have broken into federal agencies. The executive order requires software manufacturers like Microsoft to prove that their products meet security requirements before the federal government will buy them.
Today, Biden issued a statement declaring his belief that the Equal Rights Amendment guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex is the law of the land. Congress passed the amendment in 1972 and sent it off to the states for ratification, imposing on that ratification a seven-year deadline. Thirty states ratified the ERA within the next year, but a fierce opposition campaign led by right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly eroded support among Republicans, and although Congress extended the deadline by three years, only 35 states had signed on by 1977. And, confusing matters, legislatures in five states—Idaho, Kentucky, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Tennessee—voted to take back their earlier ratification.
In 2017, Nevada became the first state to ratify the ERA since 1977. Then Illinois stepped up, and finally, in 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, putting it over the required three quarters of states needed for the amendment to become part of the Constitution. But the radical right worried that women’s legal equality to men would protect abortion rights and that, as Catholic bishops of the United States wrote to senators, it would prohibit “discrimination based on ‘sexual orientation,’ ‘gender identity,’ and other categories.” Opponents have challenged the amendment’s ratification over both the original deadline and whether the states’ rescinding of previous ratifications has merit.
Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) agrees that the amendment would help to protect abortion rights and has spearheaded efforts to get Biden to direct the national archivist, Colleen Shogan, to certify and publish the ERA, pointing out that the American Bar Association agrees that it has been ratified. But the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel says it considers the ERA expired unratified in 1982, and Shogan says she will defer to the opinion of the Office of Legal Counsel.
The executive branch doesn’t have a role in the ratification of constitutional amendments, and Biden’s announcement did not direct the archivist to certify the amendment. But a president’s public disagreement with the Office of Legal Counsel will add weight to the argument that the amendment has been ratified.
“We, as a nation, must affirm and protect women’s full equality once and for all,” Biden said.
Biden also set out to right the wrong embedded in the 1986 Anti–Drug Abuse Act. That law imposed a mandatory minimum of five years in federal prison without the possibility of parole for possession of five grams of crack cocaine, which urban Black Americans favored, while the same penalty applied to 500 grams of powdered cocaine, the form of the drug favored by white Americans. That disparity has been a symbol of racial injustice in the federal justice system, and the U.S. Sentencing Commission called for its reform in April of 1995. Today, Biden shortened the sentences of 2,490 nonviolent drug offenders convicted of crimes related to crack cocaine.
Biden and administration officials have been saying goodbye to their teams. On Thursday, Biden bid farewell to U.S. service members, thanking them for “your service to our nation and for allowing me to bear witness to your courage, your commitment, your character.” He asked them to “remember your oath” and to protect “American values: [o]ur commitment to honor, to integrity, to unity, to protecting…and defending not a person or a party or a place, but an idea…that we’re all created equal.”
Attorney General Merrick Garland also bid his team farewell yesterday, thanking them for their work confronting fentanyl dealers who threaten our communities, disrupting threats from both foreign and domestic terrorists and from authoritarian leaders that threaten the country’s security, protecting economic competition and prosecuting fraud and corruption, and defending civil rights. “You have worked to pursue justice—not politics,” he said. “That is the truth, and nothing can change it.”
Today, Secretary of State Antony Blinken thanked those in the State Department for building partnerships and strengthening alliances, “rallying the world in common cause.” “We come from different places, different experiences, different motivations and backgrounds,” he said, “But I think what brings all of us together in this place, in this time, is that unique feeling that you get going to work every single day with the Stars and Stripes behind your back,” “working every day to make things just a little bit better, a little bit more peaceful, a little bit more full of hope, of opportunity.”
Blinken told members of the department, “the custodians of the power and the promise of American diplomacy,” that he would always be their champion, but that he was returning “to the highest calling in a democracy, that of being a private citizen.”
As Biden administration officials leave, the incoming Trump administration is vowing to unleash “shock and awe” in the first days of Trump’s presidency as the new president issues what Senator John Barrasso (R-WY) called a “blizzard of executive orders” to reshape the country according to his policies. In The Bulwark today, retired U.S. Army lieutenant general Mark Hertling, former Commanding General of United States Army Europe and the Seventh Army, explained that the concept of shock and awe calls for gaining an advantage over an enemy with overwhelming firepower followed by brilliant execution. The plan anticipates paralyzing the enemy with “such overwhelming force that resistance is futile.”
For his part, Hertling seems unimpressed, noting that “if your plan calls for your side being all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect in execution, and immune to surprise—when you’re working with human beings and you presume your enemy is stupid, weak, and all but inanimate—the plan probably isn’t worth all that much.”
Aaron Zitner and Xavier Martinez of the Wall Street Journal reported today on a new Wall Street Journal poll revealing that American voters want what they call “MAGA lite, rather than extra-strength MAGA.” More than 60% oppose Trump’s plan to replace nonpartisan civil servants with loyalists. More than 60% also oppose Trump’s plan to eliminate the Department of Education. Almost 75% of voters oppose his plans for sweeping deportation raids, wanting only those with criminal records to be removed from the country. More than two thirds oppose calls to take control of Greenland, and only 46% approve of his choices for cabinet positions.
But the Republican-dominated Senate seems poised to approve Trump’s picks for cabinet secretaries and other appointees that require Senate confirmation. As they have been appearing before the committees responsible for vetting those candidates before they go on to the vote of the full Senate, key appointees have been demonstrating that their primary qualification is their loyalty to Trump.
Defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth revealed that he knows close to nothing about the actual requirements for the job but declined to say he would refuse an unconstitutional order. Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, said she would “study” the Fourteenth Amendment after being asked about the birthright citizenship embedded in it, and she refused to say that Biden won the 2020 election.
In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has apparently caved to Trump’s demand that he remove Representative Mike Turner (R-OH) from the chair of the House Select Committee on Intelligence, an action that will remove him from the committee altogether because of term limits for those committee members who are not the chair. Turner was well respected in that post by members of both parties, but was a staunch defender of Ukraine who last April had warned that it is “absolutely true” that Republican members of Congress are parroting Russian propaganda. “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”
Alice Miranda Ollstein, Caitlin Oprysko, and Irie Sentner of Politico reported yesterday that experts expect Trump and his allied political action committees to pull in as much as $250 million for Trump’s inauguration. But much of the cost of the inauguration is actually covered by taxpayer dollars, they report, and while laws require the inaugural committee to disclose its donors, there is no requirement to say where the money goes. Trump’s Inaugural Committee fundraiser told the reporters that any money not spent on the inauguration will likely go toward Trump’s presidential library.
The weather forecast for Washington, D.C., for Monday’s inauguration predicts a high in the low 20s (approximately –5° Celsius), and late this afternoon, Trump announced on his social media company that he was moving the inauguration inside to the Capitol Rotunda because of the cold. This leaves workers less than 72 hours to change the plan for an outdoor inauguration they had begun preparing for on September 18.
Members of Congress have been distributing tickets to their constituents, but because of the change, the Joint Inaugural Committee of Congress has told the public that the “vast majority of ticketed guests will not be able to attend the ceremonies in person.” The House sergeant at arms suggested to members of Congress that they should tell their constituents that their tickets should now be considered “commemorative.”
