What Went Down During Joe Biden’s Inauguration

Just two blocks south of Black Lives Matter Plaza — a section of 16th Street Northwest in Washington, D.C., renamed by Mayor Muriel Bowser last June after President Trump used tear gas on people protesting the police killing of George Floyd on the way to a photo-op — sits the White House where President-elect Biden will soon enter as President Biden. And he’ll have Black Americans to thank for helping him get there.

In his victory speech after he was projected as the winner, Biden noted that, “Especially at those moments when this campaign was at its lowest ebb, the African American community stood up again for me. You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”

But what will Biden do to return the favor? Black voters kept Biden in the top of the polls through much of the primaries and helped him win the Democratic nomination. They also helped Biden carry Georgia, a red state that hadn’t voted for a Democratic presidential candidate in more than 20 years. Biden should probably also thank Abrams, as her playbook and organizing power helped deliver a trifecta in Washington with the election of Warnock and Ossoff to the U.S. Senate (they’ll also be sworn in later today).

We’ll know soon enough what Biden will do. But the stakes are incredibly high. Black Americans have been disproportionately affected by the pandemic on every level — from the death toll to access to testing sites to receiving COVID-19 vaccinations.

The Black establishment in the Democratic Party wields a lot of influence, which could prove to be a sizable force in keeping Biden accountable for the promises he made to Black Americans on the campaign trail. For instance, in the Democratic primary, many prominent Black Democrats called for Biden to pick a Black woman as his pick for vice president, including high-ranking Rep. James Clyburn, who told NPR last March, “I really believe that we’ve reached a point in this country where African American women need to be rewarded for the loyalty that they’ve given to this party.”

Harris, of course, will be the first Black woman and first Indian American woman to be vice president. Biden’s Cabinet picks also include six Black people, including retired Army Gen. Lloyd Austin, who would be the first Black defense secretary. The question remains whether Biden will take actions that affect not only party elites but also Black voters, who have time and again turned out for him.

Biden is slated to issue a lot of executive orders in the next few days. But there is no indication that he will unilaterally forgive the student loan debt of millions of Americans, as more liberal Democrats like Sen. Elizabeth Warren and even some more centrist figures like Sen. Chuck Schumer spent much of the transition period lobbying for.

Warren, Schumer and others have argued that a president can forgive student debt and had urged Biden to forgive up to at least $50,000 of Americans’ debt using his executive power. But Biden had questioned if he had the legal authority to take this step.

It’s telling that Biden opted not to simply enact this policy and then try to defend it in the courts. It is likely that Biden is wary of using his executive power in ways that moderate Democrats and Republicans will view as unusual and unprecedented. It also perhaps underscores that he and some of his advisers don’t think forgiving student loan debt in such a broad way is an ideal policy (as opposed to more targeted aid or aid for people who did not attend college.)

But Biden’s resistance to this policy is telling, as it’s part of a dynamic that we are likely to see a lot of in his administration: Biden disappointing his party’s left wing. It’s likely, for instance, a President Sanders or Warren would have tried to implement a massive debt forgiveness via executive order had they won the Democratic primary and been elected president. But, of course, neither of them did.

Weeks before President Trump’s inauguration in 2017, there was a question of how swiftly Trump would move to overturn executive actions implemented by Obama, given that Trump had campaigned on undoing much of his predecessor’s legacy. And while Trump did end up revoking a number of consequential Obama actions, like withdrawing the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate change and withdrawing the U.S. from a nuclear agreement with Iran, undoing an outgoing president’s executive actions is not a given — even when the incoming president is from the other party.

One reason is because executive actions typically expand the scope of executive branch influence, and an incoming president often wants to preserve that influence. After all, he is now the head of that branch. That said, there is little question whether Biden will undo a host of Trump’s executive actions, including the travel ban on predominantly Muslim countries and a recent order that would lift travel restrictions put in place to slow the spread of COVID-19.

So the big question this time around is not whether Biden will undo many of Trump’s executive actions, but how easy undoing some of his actions will be. And undoing some of Trump’s executive actions could be quite difficult. For instance, the Trump administration changed the naturalization exam with an executive memo, making the citizenship test longer and more difficult. But the changes to the exam already went into effect last month. Undoing something like this will be far more laborious than simply reversing the action.

All told, undoing some of Trump’s most consequential executive actions will require a lot more work from Biden than just signing his name.