It’s been fewer than two weeks since Joe Biden took office as President of the United States, and so far, he’s signed 37 executive orders. This flurry of signatures rides on the wave of the “unfuck what Trump fucked up” sentiment on which Biden was elected.
Now, they won’t tell you that’s the reason Biden was voted into office; they’ll perpetuate the “healing and unity” and “saving the soul of America” myths. One glaring problem is that if you’re trying to unify, heal, and save America’s soul because some dictatorial outsider shat on your holy temple of democracy for the past four years, why is the new president acting like a dictator?
Is this soul-saving? Is it preserving our great democracy (republic)? Why is it OK that Biden does it, but problematic when Trump did it? These questions are merely rhetorical, of course.
I fully expected that the establishment would spackle over whatever cracks remained in its sacred walls after Trump left office. Honestly, I didn’t think they would take such a “we’re back in charge, bitches” approach to it. I thought there would be some spreading out of the process of re-securing power over time.
Biden is 78 years old and is certainly acting like he’s only got so much time left on the planet. The man has wanted to be president most of his life, and now that his dream has come true, he appears to be trying to do as much in only a few weeks what another president might have done in his first term. Clock’s ticking; sign a bunch of shit, right?
The biggest problem here should be pretty obvious: how do you run your presidential campaign on a mission to save the soul of America and then behave like you’re trying to save the soul of Zimbabwe? This is probably how Robert Mugabe handles affairs in that country’s government, but here, at least as I learned in grade school, we’re supposed to have a legislative process: Congress passes a bill, Senate votes on it, President signs or vetoes. Remember that? I don’t think I even knew what an executive order was until the Obama years and it became an increasingly hotter issue.
America is supposed to be a nation of laws, not executive orders. One man is not supposed to lord over 330 million people with a few strokes of a pen. That’s kind of what we were trying to avoid with that whole dust-up in 1776.
Now because, apparently, Trump was so horrible and decimated our great nation to such a great degree, we need a senile septuagenarian to undo the damage, even if that means acting like a king rather than a president.
That’s not the soul of America, and that’s the real point here. Whatever is left of the soul of America – our democratic process – is a dead horse, and Biden continues to beat it with every executive order. It’d be one thing if these orders were signed over a year – or even better from a PR perspective, Biden had the Congress and the Senate act on his behalf as a way of pretending that our system still has some validity – but again, he appears to be in a big hurry and doesn’t mind skirting the process in order to achieve the desired ends.
While I’m not really surprised by all this, what I don’t like is the façade: stop giving me cones of fecal matter and tell me it’s ice cream. Biden is acting in a dictatorial fashion, and let’s be honest about that. Let’s not pretend the American system is being restored as Biden stutters and signs his way through these daily signatory ceremonies.
I think the more we’re honest about what’s going on, the sooner we can admit that this is not the America originally envisioned. It hasn’t been for a long time, but since the veil is dropping at such a rapid pace, let’s come to the realization that there’s a significant percentage of the population that supports this kind of action as long as it’s done in their perceived interests.
Trump supporters cheered his executive orders while Democratic voters clutched their pearls. Now it’s the MAGA folks who are having tantrums at the sight of Biden trying to sign his way through the voiding of Trump’s presidency.
This will go on. Let’s say 2024 ushers in the election of a new Republican president. That person will use the executive order as much as Biden did – whether he/she does so with the same frequency is another question, but it’s not as if there will be a sudden epiphany that the executive order is antithetical to the spirit of our Constitution.
I say we nip this in the bud. Since we’re no longer living in the America that was originally conceived, let’s agree that 330 million people cannot share this fiat political system run by a very small group of oligarchs.
If there are people who truly want to live in a society in which one man creates their Utopia with the stroke of a pen, let them break off and enjoy that small piece of heaven. Others can experiment with different types of societies that better reflect their shared values and visions of community.
But whether we want to admit it or not, this cannot continue. This is not healing or unifying. As the flaunting of power continues on one side and the anger and resentment grows on the other, we will become more divided and express it in ways that won’t be pretty.
Let’s avoid that all together. It’s time for a peaceful separation, and that should be our goal moving forward, even if we choose to participate in this farce of a democratic political process
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