Donald Trump may be speaking this Sunday before CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference) to rev up his troops, but there is no doubt that after the decision of SCOTUS yesterday, the unravelling of the Trump years has commenced in earnest. It will take time and be ponderous, but the slow wheels of justice are beginning to grind. It will require continued patience from Trump’s detractors, but regardless of whatever bluster is emanating from Mar-a-Lago, American justice will now dominate Trump’s life. Even with three of his appointees on the Supreme Court, former President Trump did not evoke a signal dissent yesterday in the High Court’s order.
There is a real sense that President Biden has told his new staff and Cabinet Secretaries to keep their heads to the grindstone. The one flare-up in the White House with a member of the communication staff was doused within 36 hours. The President is spending his weekends at Camp David or in the White House making minimal headlines and focusing exclusively on the pandemic, the economy, and the natural crisis in Texas.
Dignity, decency, and normalcy are rapidly returning to Washington, not a minute too soon.
President Joe Biden’s remarks last evening on the occasion of his memorialization of the 500,000 Americans who have succumbed to the pandemic, was the President in his role as national healer. For Joe Biden empathy is totally natural and not gratuitous.
The President went to visit his former Republican colleague Senator Bob Dole who is now fighting stage 4 lung cancer. This is what old political rivals do when they see their friends failing.
President Biden looks like he will not get all his Cabinet appointees approved, beginning probably with OMB nominee Neera Tanden. No doubt, despite some disappointment, there are no angry ad hominem attacks against her opponents emerging from the White House. There are no nasty tweets in capital letters blustering forth in the middle of the night. Politically speaking, if she or another nominee were not to get confirmed, the President will not lose the “points” he received from some of his supporters. He had honored his promise but, unfortunately, Tanden was seen as having too much political baggage. She became the new Administration’s sacrificial lamb.
There actually is a small group—perhaps growing--of Republican Members, especially in the Senate, who appear ready to create a bi-partisan working group that may want to join the Democrats and seek to legislate and not just pontificate. Senators Collins, Murkowski, Romney, and Sasse might actually take Biden’s offer to work together seriously. There ought to be some positive signals about legislative cooperation from both the White House and the Senate when the new COVID stimulus bill hits the Senate floor. (Even Senators Mitch McConnell and Lindsay Graham already have indicated that they intend to support Merrick Garland’s appointment as Attorney General.)
When Texas got hit with an unprecedent winter storm with water, electricity, and heat failures all at once, the Administration quickly acted. It sent equipment and staff from FEMA to help restore power, repair pipes and plumbing, and aid the suddenly homeless victims. Biden will get his acknowledgement when he eventually travels down to Texas.
The Biden team may actually exceed their goal of vaccinating 100 million people in the first 100 days. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention reports that as of February 21, over 63 million Americans have received at least one dose of the vaccine, with production moving into even higher gear.
If the virus spread continues to mitigate, vaccination availability increases, and the economy regains it vibrancy, life in Washington could get positively boring by the fall.
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