Our man in Washington
Biden moves well to the left of Obama and the Clintons ... Attorney General Merrick Garland starts repair job at the Department of Justice ... Weeding out the Trump "burrowers" ... Implications for Guantánamo "war prisoners" in light of Afghanistan withdrawal ... Republicans push ahead with electoral rorts ... More Trump corruption emerging ... Roger Fitch's letter from America
Occasionally, participants in history see the error of their ways: the supreme court justice who provided a decisive vote in Bush v Gore; the speaker of the house who facilitated the baseless Clinton impeachment.
For some, recognition of past error has not come too late. Joseph Biden has seen the light, and unlike Sandra Day O'Connor and John Boehner, he's in a position to do something about it; different from his predecessor Barack Obama, he seems to have the desire and courage to act.
Always considered right-of-centre, the new president is positioning himself well to the left of Obama and the Clintons. The new backbone and activism have delighted the Bernie Sanders wing of the party, and foreign observers, too.
Most members of Biden's cabinet have now been confirmed, many with bipartisan support. None of them qualify as foxes; instead, they are mending and guarding the henhouses.
There's a decent, highly-qualified attorney general, appeals judge Merrick Garland, confirmed five years to the day that he was appointed by Obama to the supreme court, yet refused a hearing by the then Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Can Garland repair the Justice Department? A good start was his reinstatement of consent decrees with errant police departments, scrapped by Trump to gratify the only significant union that supported him: the police. Much more could be done, e.g, rescinding Office of Legal Counsel memos that purport to immunise a president from criminal liability: it's not in the constitution or US laws.
Civil rights, undermined or sabotaged by Donald Trump, are to be enforced and protected, and corporate crime prosecuted. Antitrust enforcement could be resumed.
The senate judiciary committee has asked Garland to trace and report on destructive holdovers at Justice, Trump "burrowers" who converted political appointments to civil service positions as Trump departed. His "leftovers" are also a problem in other departments.
Garland: rooting out the Trumpist holdovers
An experienced diplomat, Antony Blinken, is secretary of state, a clear improvement over Trump's wrecking-ball foreign secretary, Mike Pompeo, the subject of a damning new departmental IG ethics review. Already, the shameful sanctions imposed against witnesses and investigators for the International Criminal Court have been revoked.
Climate and other science, banished by Trump, have been reintroduced, and scientific facts restored to government websites; Trump's [bad] advice panels have been replaced.
There will be an Environmental Protection Administrator who believes in protecting the environment.
Trump's Big Oil-orchestrated ban on improved emission standards will be undone by the Transportation Department, while the FDA plans to take lead, arsenic and other horrifying contaminants out of the environment, instead of maintaining or increasing them, as Trump's perverse regulations often did.
At the Labour Department there will be, instead of an implacable foe from an anti-labour law firm, a secretary who believes in enforcing labour laws and supporting organised workers.
A revitalised Federal Trade Commission is seeking legislative authority for expanding rather than limiting consumer remedies.
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Biden's litigation posture in pending legal proceedings commenced during Trump's term has been much more progressive than Obama's when he took office (see Fitch, Feb. 24, 2009). Obama accepted and pursued Bush arguments that suited him (e.g, for the accumulation of executive powers), but Biden has altered the government's position in many pending cases. Some major lawsuits remain to be sorted.
Biden's administration has nevertheless availed itself of some harmful rules and regs from the Trump era, and needlessly appealed the Julian Assange extradition that was denied in Britain.
The Pentagon has announced new military commission charges, against Hambali, a terrorist with no connection to any war, or the US, other than American Bali-bombing victims - far fewer than the Australians affected.
Biden's Guantánamo litigation strategy complicates senior senators' efforts to close the prison; their arguments, however, assume the continuance of military prosecutions, only one of which truly involves a war-time war crime: that of Abd Al Hadi.
In theory, the promised official end to the war in Afghanistan should bar US claims that the men are detained as "war prisoners". Much depends on Guantánamo appeals headed for (likely unsympathetic) supreme court review.
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Republicans aim to fix the results after an election
As electoral redistricting looms, the demographically-doomed Republicans no longer conceal their aversion to democratic elections, i.e, majority rule, relying instead on egregious gerrymanders.
The decennial US Census counts the whole population, enabling the drawing of congressional and other voting districts. State legislatures control and determine the districting. If they fail to do so, courts may step in to draw the revised districts, but in Rucho v Common Cause (2019), the supreme court ruled that a legislature's partisan (as opposed to race-based) gerrymander is a non-justiciable political question.
Trump failed in his effort to produce a 2020 census based solely on citizenship (rather than the 14th Amendment's "whole number of persons"), but the delay in census data, only released this week, caused new problems.
Selectively suppressing votes - choosing voters - remains the key Republican policy, and it's entering a dangerous new phase where the objective is subverting undesired results after the election. A recent independent report catalogues the state manoeuvres.
The Democrat congress has introduced proposed new voting standards for federal elections (more here), but presently voting parameters are set in individual states, most of which lack independent redistricting bodies.
The most radical Republicans remain those in the Republican statehouses, e.g, Georgia, where it's now a crime to provide food or water to the weary forced to queue for hours to vote; it's all part of a suite of cruel and mean-spirited new laws in party-controlled states.
In eight of these states, Republicans are asserting new political powers over the voting, seeking to undo the legal safeguards that restrained Donald Trump from stealing the election.
Some of the Bills strip independent elections officials of their power to enforce the acts they administer, and give politicians the ultimate control. Georgia Republicans, smarting from the loss of two US senators, have passed one of the most outrageous of these laws, one that removes the popularly-elected state elections administrator from the elections board, and allows the party's legislators to overrule disfavoured decisions of that body, e.g, the certified, objective results of the election.
There's more comment here and here.
Beyond the dominance of Republicans in state legislatures lies the obstacle of a partisan supermajority of Republicans on the supreme court.
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More details of the crimes and defalcations of Trump's appointees are soon to come out with the release of previously-quashed reports by departmental inspectors general.
More Trump corruption is coming to light, and he faces lawsuits on numerous fronts (here's the latest litigation tracker). Surprisingly, his position on the Forbes rich list fell 300 places during his term, despite his extraordinary efforts to enrich himself.
