Washington’s wildlife is rich with wolves and vultures, hawks and vermin. Every few years, four to eight years, a new species appears in this unique habitat: the lame duck.
The season of lame duck The year came earlier than last week, with President Joe Biden’s decision not to seek re-election and the announcement that he was handing over the baton to his vice president, Kamala Harris. On Wednesday, with a speech from the Oval Office in prime time, Biden wrote the beginning of the new, perhaps last, chapter of his professional life, in which he, who has been almost everything in Washington, will remain at the helm of the world’s leading power for six months, while trying to ensure a good memory for his legacy.
The concept of lame duckreferring to a politician whose days are numbered because he has lost an election, does not intend to run again or has reached the limit of terms allowed by the Constitution, became popular in the United States in the 1920s under President Calvin Coolidge, who made a decision similar to Biden’s. Four decades later, Lyndon B. Johnson, another leader in trouble, did the same. Johnson tried unsuccessfully to end the Vietnam War in the nine months he had left after resigning. He was also not allowed to appoint a Supreme Court justice.
“In fact, the condition of lame duck “Biden’s term is, by comparison, surprisingly short,” presidential historian Russell Riley said in an email Sunday, referring to the fact that he, Coolidge and Johnson all belong to the rare breed of one-term president. “You typically know your expiration date four years in advance. So I think he will focus on doing as much as he can from the White House for the Harris campaign.”
Biden also has, like Johnson, a war to resolve on the table. His efforts to achieve a ceasefire in Gaza and the release of the hostages held by Hamas (115, eight of whom are Americans) will mark his last half year as commander-in-chief, but at least he will be able to devote himself to them without the distraction of an election campaign, now that it will be Harris, in all likelihood, who will face Republican Donald Trump on November 5.
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The first thing Biden did after offering (rather few) explanations for his resignation was, by chance, a calendar that had been set for weeks, to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the day after the latter gave a speech on Capitol Hill. In a joint session of the Senate and the House of Representatives with numerous casualties in the Democratic caucus, Netanyahu asked for unconditional US support for his war in Gaza, which he presented as a “fight between barbarism and civilization.” His meeting with the president was overshadowed by the one he had later with Harris, who later described in a sharp tone to the press a conversation in which the vice president urged him to call for a ceasefire and warned him that she “will not remain silent” about the humanitarian cost in Gaza.
The contrast between the two styles and the way Harris stole the show on Thursday made analysts wonder whether Netanyahu will listen to Biden or if he has already turned the page and will pay more attention to Harris or Trump, with whom he met on Friday at the former president’s residence in Mar-a-Lago, Camelot of Trumpism. That is another of the paradoxes of lame duck: He is less afraid of the electoral consequences of his bets, but his expiration date also makes him an animal that does not inspire the same respect as before among his rivals in the political jungle.
In his speech from the Oval Office, Biden completed his six-month foreign policy to-do list by pledging to continue leading the international response to Russian President Vladimir Putin to “prevent him from taking over Ukraine,” to work toward “a stronger NATO,” and to seek to “bring back to Americans who are unjustly detained around the world.”
Domestically, he spoke of generalities such as reducing costs for working families, strengthening the economy, defending civil rights, from voting to abortion, denouncing hatred and extremism, calming the waters of political violence after the recent attack on Trump, combating climate change and increasing gun control. He also promised to put on track another of the flagship programs of his mandate: the Cancer Moonshot initiative (named in a nod to the race that took the United States to the moon in the sixties). The goal is to reduce cancer deaths in the country by half over the next 25 years, as well as improve the quality of life of patients.
On a more practical level, Biden will push to ensure that his two most successful legislative achievements – the major infrastructure plan he pushed through before losing the Democratic majority in Congress and the Inflation Reduction Act, with its climate agenda – continue to receive the promised influx of millions.
Appoint judges
The president has also made it his mission to appoint federal judges to fill the 48 vacancies that currently exist, as well as to resolve the future of other positions in the various federal agencies: this week, the director of the Secret Service was added to that list, after his boss, Kimberly Cheatle, gave in to pressure and resigned over the rulings that led to the attack on Trump at a rally in Pennsylvania.
And he has said he will push for changes to the Supreme Court before he leaves office in January, such as limiting the terms of its nine justices, now serving for life, and approving an ethics code to govern their performance. The scandal over Clarence Thomas’ undeclared gifts is still lingering, and the judicial year that just ended was marked by the apparent rapport with Trump in the months following his 2020 electoral defeat of Samuel Alito’s wife. In another peculiarity of the American system, the Supreme Court, whose composition is the most conservative in eight decades, is the most powerful and least controlled high court in the West.
How much of that ambitious agenda he can push through depends in part on Congress, where Democrats hold a slim majority in the Senate but not in the House, and lawmakers up for reelection (all of those in the lower chamber and a third of those in the upper chamber) will be distracted by their campaigns.
For that reason, Riley says, Biden’s use of executive orders will be watched closely. “It’s the way to make life difficult for the incoming administration, if it’s from the opposition party,” the historian explains. “No president can completely inoculate the executive branch against the decisions of his successor, but he can create obstructions that make life difficult for himself. For example, there were a series of labor and environmental measures that Bill Clinton adopted in 2000 that gave Bush problems, and he had to spend time reviewing and fixing them. I suspect that President Biden is much less interested at the moment in collaborative legislation (which is probably not realistic anyway) than in creating as many obstacles as possible to a transition to another Trump presidency.”
Republicans are not in the mood to help. For them, the latest developments are proof of what they have been hinting at for some time: that Biden, 81, is nothing more than the puppet of the team of technocrats (from Steve Ricchetti, in domestic affairs, to Jake Sullivan, in foreign affairs) that the longest-serving president in the history of the United States has surrounded himself with.
According to calculations by The New York Times, Since he announced he would not seek re-election, 97 Republican elected officials have called for his immediate resignation, following a reasoning that can be summed up by the argument of Kansas Senator Roger Marshall: “If he is not fit to face a second term, he should resign now. If he is not fit to campaign, he should not have access to the nuclear codes either. It is that simple.”
In his farewell speech, Biden responded to these criticisms by saying that he intended to “focus” on doing his “job as president.” It was 11 minutes filled with his favorite phrases (“We are the United States of America and there is simply nothing, nothing that is beyond our capacity when we do it together”) and historical references to place his legacy in the mirror of other great men who passed through the White House. Without the distraction of a campaign, he will be able to devote more efforts to trying to sell that legacy in the market of posterity, trusting that Harris wins and the 10 weeks of transition after the elections will be smooth, and also that the present does not bring him more scares. He would not be the first: at the end of his eight years as president, George W. Bush had to face the outbreak of the 2008 crisis and put everything else aside to push through a bailout for the financial sector.
Biden’s case has one last peculiarity. In the Washington fauna, the lame duck It is that animal that ends up transformed into an almost mythological creature: the ex-president. And there the work continues for posterity. The most obvious example is that of Jimmy Carter. He was a one-term leader, followed by a brilliant post-presidency, full of achievements in the search for conflict resolution and in the eradication of diseases such as the Guinea worm, which led him to win the Nobel Peace Prize. When he left office, he was 56 years old and now Carter is heading towards his centenary, in October. What Biden will dedicate his efforts to in the years he has left after leaving the White House is another of the questions about his future that remains unanswered for now.
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