January 20, 2021: A New Day in America

The day many Americans felt could not get here soon enough has at last arrived and the toxic and vicious Trump/Pence regime draws to a close as Joe Biden is sworn in as president and immediately will sign a list of executive orders to reverse the wrong headed policies of his predecessor,  These executive orders will range from rejoining the Paris Climate Accord, to rejoining the World Health Organization to rescinding Trump's racist 1776 Commission which sought to inject a white supremacist, anti-feminist, anti-equality version of history into public school curriculums.  Like so much of what came out of the Trump/Pence regime, the commission's report was 100% right wing ideology with little supporting fact or scholarship.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Biden's first steps to roll back the dark night of the Trump/Pence regime.  Here are excerpts:

President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. will unleash a full-scale assault on his predecessor’s legacy on Wednesday, acting hours after taking the oath of office to sweep aside President Trump’s pandemic response, reverse his environmental agenda, tear down his anti-immigration policies, bolster the sluggish economic recovery and restore federal efforts aimed at promoting diversity.

Moving with an urgency not seen from any other modern president, Mr. Biden will sign 17 executive orders, memorandums and proclamations from the Oval Office on Wednesday afternoon, according to his top policy advisers.

Individually, the actions are targeted at what the incoming president views as specific, egregious abuses by Mr. Trump during four tumultuous years. Collectively, his advisers said Mr. Biden’s assertive use of executive authority was intended to be a hefty and visible down payment on one of his primary goals as president: to, as they said Tuesday, “reverse the gravest damages” done to the country by Mr. Trump.

“We don’t have a second to waste when it comes to tackling the crises we face as a nation,” Mr. Biden said Tuesday night on Twitter after arriving in Washington on the eve of his inauguration. “That’s why after being sworn in tomorrow, I’ll get right to work.”

Mr. Biden’s actions largely fall into four broad categories that his aides described as the “converging crises” he will inherit at noon Wednesday: the pandemic, economic struggles, immigration and diversity issues, and the environment and climate change.

In some cases, Mr. Biden plans to unilaterally and immediately reverse policies and procedures that Mr. Trump put in place. In other instances, limits on his authority require the new president to direct others in his administration to act or even to begin what could be a long process to shift the federal government in a new direction.

“A new day,” Jeff Zients, the coordinator of Mr. Biden’s coronavirus response, said on Tuesday. “A new, different approach to managing the country’s response to the Covid-19 crisis.”

One of Mr. Biden’s first actions on Wednesday will be to sign an executive order making Mr. Zients the government’s official Covid-19 response coordinator, reporting to the president. The order will also restore the directorate for global health security and biodefense at the National Security Council, a group that Mr. Trump had disbanded.

Mr. Biden will also sign an executive order that Mr. Trump had steadfastly refused to issue during his tenure — imposing a national mandate requiring masks and physical distancing in all federal buildings, on all federal lands and by all federal employees, officials said. And he will terminate Mr. Trump’s efforts to leave the World Health Organization, sending Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease specialist, to participate in the group’s annual executive board meeting on Thursday.

He will sign an executive order revoking the Trump administration’s plan to exclude noncitizens from the census count and a second order aimed at bolstering the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that protects “Dreamers” from deportation. Mr. Trump had sought for years to end the program, known as DACA.

Mr. Biden will repeal two Trump-era proclamations that established a ban on travel to the United States from several predominantly Muslim and African countries, ending one of his predecessor’s earliest actions to limit immigration. Advisers said Mr. Biden would direct the State Department to develop ways to address the harm caused to those prevented from coming to the United States because of the ban.

Another executive order will revoke enhanced enforcement of immigration violations aimed at people already inside the United States. Another will block deportation of Liberians who had been living in the United States. And another will halt construction of Mr. Trump’s border wall — which was devised to keep immigrants out of the country — while Mr. Biden’s administration examines the legality of the wall’s funding and its construction contracts.

Mr. Biden, who takes office after a year of racial upheaval in the country, will move quickly on Wednesday to begin to unwind some of Mr. Trump’s policies that he views as contributing to the polarization and division, according to his top domestic policy adviser.

Susan Rice, who will lead the president’s Domestic Policy Council, said that Mr. Biden would sign a broad executive order aimed at requiring all federal agencies to make equity a central factor in their work. The order will, among other things, require that they deliver a report within 200 days to address how to remove barriers to opportunities in policies and programs.

Another executive order will require that the federal government does not discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity, a policy that reverses action by Mr. Trump’s administration. Another will overturn a Trump executive order that limited the ability of federal government agencies to use diversity and inclusion training.

And Mr. Biden will cancel Mr. Trump’s 1776 Commission, which released a report on Monday that historians said distorted the history of slavery in the United States.

Many of Mr. Trump’s most significant actions as president were aimed at limiting regulation of the environment and pulling back from efforts to combat climate change. Mr. Biden’s earliest actions as president will take aim at those policies, officials said.