Biden steadily hits reset
While the GOP fringers whisper QAnon baloney to one another and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy kisses the ring of a disgraced former president now twice impeached, Joe Biden stayed steady last week in the Oval Office resetting American norms.
In his first week, Biden put us back in the Paris climate pact, revoked the permit for the unneeded Keystone XL pipeline, restored several national monuments whose footprints were reduced by his predecessor, halted the construction of “the wall” along our Southern border (saving at least an estimated $2.5 billion) and scrapped a batch of previous administration executive actions that restricted how federal agencies make regulatory changes, including one nonsensical one requiring agencies to discard two regulations for every one proposed.
Biden unveiled a plan for immigration reform, reaffirmed the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals known as DACA, ordered undocumented immigrants to be counted in the census, ordered his government to conduct equity assessments of its agencies, reversed his predecessor’s transgender military ban, signed an order banning discrimination on the basis of gender identity or sexual orientation and reversed a policy barring entry to the U.S. for refugees and residents from seven predominantly Muslim countries.
As for the swamp, Biden nixed Trump’s midnight bid to reverse ethics commitments for executive branch employees. The new president, instead, upped ethics controls, signing an order requiring all government appointees to sign an ethics pledge prohibiting the acceptance of gifts from registered lobbyists and lobbying for at least two years even after exiting the government.