One thing Biden could do...

[jsburbidge]

 ... which Trump couldn't reverse:

Pardon everybody Trump has mentioned going after for personal or partisan reasons. (His relatives, Harris, Cheney, etc.).

There's precedent for broad pardons for "anything done under the term of ..." (more monarchical than Presidential, but there's continuity there).

Mist things a president can do by executive order can be reversed by another executive order. Pardons are not in that category.

Comments

[graydon]

That assumes a domain-of-laws situation once Trump has been inaugurated.

I don't think that's what's going to happen.

Trump's attorney-general pick, in particular, strikes me as a strong signal that there will be no law, at least not for the made guys, which means there's no protection of law for anybody else.

[jsburbidge]

"The laws of England are at my commandment. Blessed are they that have been my friends, and woe to my Lord Chief Justice!"

Though Trump-as-Falstaff-intended is, I'm sure, what Trump intends, the US is odd, legally from a Canadian perspective.

The states have a lot more independence and power and - even recently, even with this Supreme Court, in decisions benefitting blue states - conservative lawyers tend towards upholding states' rights. You're more likely to have a patchwork where rule of law functions, if with a few more fireworks than usual, in blue states, and gets sidelined in red states.

That being said, I expect that the next four years will see the first successful claim to convention refugee status by someone from the States on the basis of a well-founded fear of persecution on political grounds, further strengthening the "America is a third world country" view already raised when talking about things like infant mortality.

[graydon]

I think admitting a convention refugee from the States would so offend them that the consequences are going to prevent it from ever happening de jure. (I also think climate refugees are going to de jure collapse the convention; that's already close to having happened de facto.)

And, yes, that's what is supposed to happen and the states retain some measure of sovereignty and none of it matters if there's no means to enforce the laws. It's the "no means to enforce" that I'm expecting; it fits with the Russian-asset version of things, it fits with the "none dare refuse" CEO mindset, and it fits with the dementia. It intensely fits with the confederate desire to use the USG as a means of oppressing everyone they don't like, too, as well as the function of police forces as instruments of white supremacy.

Hopefully I am being unduly pessimistic.

[ndrosen]

I agree.