Cleaning Up After The Elephants: Volume 1

“Some of us are like a shovel brigade that follow a parade down Main Street cleaning up.”–Chief-Of-Staff Donald Regan after a typical Reagan screw-up.

The Biden Administration has a lot of shoveling to do to clean up the cheeseburger-infested feces of Donald Trump.  That shoveling begins today.

This will be a rare ‘good news’ series, as everything that the Biden team does to clean up will be by nature an improvement.

Biden will be signing quite a few executive orders today and taking other action to immediately put his stamp on the Presidency.  I will add them as the day  goes along.

However, his Executive Order on the census has already been announced, and it’s, wait for it, Yu-u-u-ge:

Among the orders that Biden will sign Wednesday is a census executive order that will rescind Trump’s plan, announced in July, to exclude certain immigrants from the census population counts used for congressional apportionment. The order will also undo a 2019 Trump order directing the Census Bureau to produce data on noncitizens, with the aim of facilitating a redistricting overhaul that would have also diminished immigrant political power.

The Trump apportionment policy was the capstone of the administration’s four-year crusade to manipulate the census to boost Republicans’ electoral advantages.

Had President Trump been able to implement the policy before he left office, it stood to shift House seats away from immigrant-rich parts of the country, while boosting the congressional representation for whiter, more reliably-Republican regions.

Congressional apportionment typically happens in early January in the year after the decennial census. The pandemic disrupted those plans for the 2020 census and the Census Bureau, with Trump’s support, asked Congress for four extra months to deliver the data. Around the time that Trump announced his anti-immigrant apportionment policy, the White House reversed on giving the bureau an extended schedule. The administration instructed the bureau to severely truncate the final phases of the census so that the data would be delivered more quickly, presumably so that Trump would still be in office to implement the policy even if Biden won the election.

I’m stretching the boundaries of fair use, so I’ll stop there, except to point out that Trump’s plan to politicize the census would have succeeded, if not for the incompetence of the people Trump put in charge.  I’ll be back this afternoon to add lots more to this as Biden signs Executive Orders and takes other action.

Like I said, a rare ‘good news’ series from me.  Man I needed this catharsis…

More, from Politico:

On his first day in the White House, Biden will sign 15 executive actions covering the pandemic, economic relief, immigration, climate change and racial equity. He will also move to freeze dozens of last-minute Trump administration regulations and send an immigration bill to Congress that will provide a pathway to citizenship for millions of undocumented immigrants.