Alex Milan Tracy/Sipa USA via AP Images
Federal officers after launching rounds of tear gas near the federal courthouse in Portland, July 20, 2020
We’re less than four months from November’s election, and Joe Biden, according to every major poll, is poised to run away with it. President Trump has effectively given up on any effort to contain the coronavirus, which has become a botch job without historical comparison. He seems largely uninterested, too, in shoring up the economy with another stimulus package, content to let enhanced unemployment benefits expire despite an unemployment rate in the teens.
Not surprisingly, his favorability has plummeted.
What Trump is interested in, however, is a show of paramilitary might in the streets of the country’s cities, cracking down on protesters demonstrating for Black Lives Matter and basic civil liberties. That’s played out vividly on the streets of Portland, where over the last few days the Trump administration dispatched unidentified militarized officers of the Department of Homeland Security, foot soldiers of Customs and Border Protection, and the U.S. Marshals, to snatch protesters off the streets in unmarked minivans and shower them with tear gas, pepperballs, and rubber bullets.
So satisfied with their behavior so far, Trump has now committed to sending another 150 such agents to Chicago to subdue protesters there, as well. He indicated Monday that he’d soon be deploying units to New York City, Detroit, Philadelphia, Oakland, and elsewhere for the same purpose. “In Portland they’ve done a fantastic job,” the president said. Axios has reported that the White House is being closely advised by John Yoo, architect of the George W. Bush torture memo and the “unitary executive” theory which allows executive authority to supersede all other branches, including and especially the Supreme Court. (Yoo, it’s been reported, is helping Trump get around the court’s ruling on DACA, and is also supplying tips to override the courts broadly going forward.)
It could be persuasively argued that utter disregard for and inability to handle the acute health and economic crises, combined with a startling display of military force and contempt for checks and balances elegantly sums up the Trump presidential experience. But an embrace of the totally unchecked semi-totalitarian power of the Department of Homeland Security, disregard for constitutional rights and other branches of government, and buddying up with John Yoo can’t rightfully be called the Trump Doctrine. Because those are all signature moves from the playbook of George W. Bush, combining Bush’s new cabinet department with Bush’s advisers and Bush’s theory of governance.
The Trump administration is now leaning on Bush’s own presidential legacies to get its agenda enacted.
In fact, for all the Republicans, including Bush himself, that have expressed a degree of unease with Trump’s tenure, the Trump administration is now leaning on Bush’s own presidential legacies to get its agenda enacted. It’s rightfully been noted that merely beating Trump in November is not going to be enough to bring an end to the Trump era—the astounding number of Trump-appointed judges and swelling ranks of the QAnon caucus among Republican candidates make that gloomily clear. So if Joe Biden is going to take Trump’s place, he’s not merely going to need to undo the pernicious impact of Trumpism, he’s also going to need to undo the legacy of George W. Bush.
That starts with the DHS.
Many Democrats, for some reason, have spent the past 12 years forgetting the actual impact of the Bush presidency. One of the least popular presidents in history at the time of his departure, mastermind of the war in Iraq, the financial crisis, Hurricane Katrina, and more, Bush’s approval rating among all Americans sunk as low as 25 percent, which still somehow seems high. Fast forward not even a decade, however, and a majority of Democrats now say they view him favorably.
Looking forward, it turned out, meant letting many of Bush’s great sores continue to fester.
Joe Biden was elected alongside Barack Obama with a powerful mandate to undo the abominable handiwork of the Bush administration. But Obama and Biden did nothing of the sort. They insisted on looking forward, and prosecuted no one involved in crimes of finance or war. They pledged to close Guantanamo Bay, but didn’t. Looking forward, it turned out, meant letting many of Bush’s great sores continue to fester.
One of the Bush creations, though less of a headline grabber than some of the other transgressions, was the Department of Homeland Security, created by the Homeland Security Act of 2002. The creation of the agency, which opened up shop formally in 2003, marked a drastic change in American policing and the militarization of the “homeland.” With it came the Patriot Act, which aggressively curtailed American civil liberties, as well as the consolidation of a number of existing agencies, including the Coast Guard and Customs and Border Protection (now the largest federal law enforcement agency) under DHS’s umbrella.
Ironically, the push for a new cabinet-level department like DHS originally came from the Democratic Party. But many Democrats balked when they saw how much leeway President Bush wanted in running the department. Ultimately 120 House Democrats voted against it, along with a handful of senators (Joe Biden, senator from Delaware, was not among them). According to Democratic Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, the bill came “at the expense of unnecessarily undermining our privacy rights” and weakened “protections against unwarranted government intrusion into the lives of ordinary Americans."
As the years went by, however, Democrats did little to oppose DHS, readily approving numerous increases in funding to the department even under the Trump administration. Now, untrammeled and unidentified militarized forces are roaming the streets against the wishes of state and local government, beating up veterans without provocation and teargassing mothers in peaceful gatherings. Democrats are now calling for investigations into these rampages.
For his part, Bush never sent his newly commissioned troops to subdue free expression in the same way. But he laid the groundwork for a disregard of civil liberties, and for a juiced up federal force with limitless funding and limited accountability. He created the road map for an executive branch reined in by neither the courts nor the Congress. These are the conditions Trump inherited when he took office. Even House Democrats who pressed for Trump’s impeachment have admitted as much—there’s nothing they can do to keep Trump in check.
Biden’s pitch to voters around the country is that he’ll undo the shameful acts of his Republican predecessor. But because he and Obama failed to accomplish exactly that during his first sojourn in the West Wing, a second trip will require him to do double duty. If Trumpism is going to be overhauled, Biden is going to have to be willing to tear down Bushism, too. That may not align nicely with Biden’s warm embrace of Republicans ready to abandon Trump, but it’s the job he was elected to do in 2008, and it will still be before him if he’s elected in 2020.
And doing so is not really all that difficult. Already, Democrats are moving to curtail the budget for the Pentagon by 10 percent, a proposal that, if passed, would give Biden serious momentum for revisiting DHS. And while the Democratic-controlled House has voted to increase funding for the Border Patrol since 2018, it could just as easily freeze funding in a forthcoming budget. Biden himself could call on them to do that, before pledging to reconfigure a department that is now widely being referred to as the “secret police.” These are not tall asks.
The creation of DHS represented a massive realignment within the federal government: It was the largest federal government reorganization since the creation of the Department of Defense. This is the scale of action which a Biden administration should be contemplating. His campaign’s pledge to return to normal and revert to sanity cannot and should not accommodate the DHS as is. The DHS has never been either normal or sane. And despite their shared antipathy to Trump, Biden must resist any impulse to link himself with George W. Bush. If Bush’s legacy is here to stay, so too is Trumpism.
