Biden’s Last-Minute Actions Were A Catastrophic Own Goal – OpEd

By Andrew Morrow

Just before US President Donald Trump returned to his rightful place on January 20, the outgoing Joe Biden administration decided to add just a couple more entries to the catalog of egregious and/or maliciously stupid actions it has filled out over the past four years. One of these, in particular, practically gift-wrapped Trump the ability to remake the country in a way that hasn’t been seriously considered for generations.

Opening up a dump truck of worms

On Friday afternoon, January 17, in the final business hours available to the Biden administration, staffers posted a bizarre and bewildering series of tweets. (I won’t say Biden did, since the man can hardly string two sentences together, and him managing his own tweets would be too great a stretch of the imagination.) These posts purported to amend the constitution by declaring the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) enacted.

The ERA was one of those left-wing policy experiments that cropped up in the 1970s which, had it passed, would have removed any legal distinction between the sexes. This may sound like a good thing, but it would not have been if you think about it for about ten seconds. For example, if the ERA had passed, sex-specific restrooms would not ever be a thing. Nevertheless, it got a lot of traction, but it failed to clear the required number of state ratifications before the legal deadline and was dropped.

However, the presidential X account announced that, based on some subsequent, symbolic state adoptions of resolutions supporting the ERA, the amendment had cleared the required hurdles to become the “28th Amendment” and was now the law of the land. Of course, it isn’t; nevertheless, this did not stop the vice presidential X accountand a host of Democrat gubernatorial and legislative accounts from echoing the assertions that the ERA was now the law of the land.

Let’s pause for a moment and reflect on the wisdom of setting the precedent of amending the constitution by tweet just days before Donald Trump retakes power. You know, the Shitposter-in-Chief. Did anyone consider that? No, they didn’t, of course. Leftists aren’t very good with second-order consequences in the best of times, certainly not in a moment of such high stress as the return of Orange Hitler. And of course, Biden’s interns and lackeys didn’t actuallymanage to legally amend the constitution — but if anyone might be capable of doing that, it would be Trump. They should not have given him the idea.

Questionable legality begets questionable legality

As if that bit of political brilliance wasn’t enough, the administration followed it up on the morning of the inauguration with a number of last-minute preemptive pardons to people such as:

(1) Anthony Fauci, who totally didn’t commit any crimes related to the COVID-19 vaccine, guys — just don’t pay attention to how his pardon covers the time when doing gain-of-function research was specifically barred.

(2) General Mark Milley, the general who totally didn’t commit stand-you-against-the-wall-without-trial treason by doing things like contacting a Chinese general and sharing military secrets and saying he would defy Trumps’ orders or lying to Trump about the presence of US soldiers in Syria in order to prevent the president from having control over his own troops.

(3) The rest of the president’s family, other than his son Hunter whom he pardoned back in December. Remember that accepting a pardon is an admission of guilt, so the Bidens are, evidently, a crime family.

But even this will pay dividends. Biden and prominent other Democrats such as Senator Adam Schiff (a beneficiary of one of Biden’s last-minute pardons himself) have previously said they believe preemptive pardons to be lawless behavior. Now, these last-minute excesses have lent Trump all the legitimacy he needed to issue a raft of blanket pardons to January 6 hostages and promulgate a batch of executive orders to do things like (1) withdraw the USA from the World Health Organization, (2) mandate that the government recognize only two sexes and, the crown jewel, (3) end birthright citizenship for both birth tourists and anchor babies.

Though Trump knows that last one is going to provoke a tough legal fight, I’m very certain he wouldn’t have done it if he wasn’t sure of ultimate victory. I myself have written about how the theory behind undoing birthright citizenship is solid, and I expect to see Trump’s Department of Justice push it across the finish line.

The idiocy of the Biden administration in trying to govern by tweet and upend “norms” has gifted Trump the ability to do what needs to be done to push his agenda forward, and I have 100% confidence that the team Trump has in place right now has the stones to see it done.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

• About the author: Andrew Morrow is a partner at Counxel Law Firm and a former administrative law judge. Born in Indiana, he later moved to Arizona. Andrew earned his bachelor’s degree in philosophy from Arizona State University. He earned his law degree from Arizona Summit Law School, a school that no longer exists, which is fine by him. Andrew currently practices civil, civil rights and employment litigation in Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. He likes to read, play video games that are really spreadsheets with graphics attached and chase his two-year-old son around.
• Source: This article was published at Fair Observer