Final Hours in Office Used to Fling Obstacles in Trump’s Path
After pledging to facilitate a smooth transition to the Oval Office for the Trump administration, Joe Biden and his team raced to do just the opposite this week, throwing as much sand in the gears as possible, with dozens of executive actions that will hamper the new president’s agenda.
In so doing, Biden gave Americans a chilling glimpse into what another four years of a democratic administration would have looked like, had Trump lost the election to Kamala Harris.
Biden’s hastily signed 32 executive actions in the last few days of his presidency encompassed key pillars of the radical left’s platform, including several aimed at embedding woke doctrines into American domestic and foreign policy, pushing the country deeper into a dangerous quagmire.
The rash of executive actions included a ban on oil and gas offshore drilling across a staggering 625 million acres of ocean along the East and West coasts, the eastern Gulf of Mexico and portions of Alaska’s Northern Bering Sea. The ban targeted liquefied natural gas (LNG) drilling in particular.
LNG plays a critical role in the global energy market, enabling countries without local natural gas resources to access this energy source. It burns cleaner than coal and oil, producing less carbon dioxide, sulfur, and nitrogen oxides.
Reflecting the left’s ‘climate change’ and ‘save marine life’ madness, Biden’s ban was guaranteed to drive a stake into the heart of the U.S. energy sector, cut deeply into government revenue, increase energy costs, and harm coastal economies.
Another of Biden’s executive action granted a million illegals from Ukraine, El Salvador and Venezuela—including many with confirmed and suspected criminal records—the right to remain in the United States (under “protected status”).
Still another series of executive orders facilitated the spending down of billions of taxpayer funds on so-called “clean energy” initiatives and other leftist causes, leaving the new administration with a reduced pool of federal money.
The former president also shunted onto taxpayers over a hundred billion dollars of “forgiven” student debt, according to the NY Post and Newsmax.
“Biden has been spending federal funds so he can dictate where the money goes before Trump takes over,” the Newsmax article said. “He’s spending money coming from the American Rescue Plan, the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, the CHIPS and Science Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act, legislation that provides more than $4 trillion in investments.”
After having his legal bid denied by the U.S. Supreme Court twice, Biden is spending his final days in office “attempting to circumvent the nation’s high court by unilaterally bailing out student loan borrowers,” the NY Post explained. “The administration announced it used taxpayer money to “cancel” the debts of more than 150,000 individuals who chose to take on such loans.”
In a rambling speech three days before leaving office, Biden boasted about his non-existent accomplishments with a straight face.
“Right now, in my view, thanks to our administration, the United States is winning the worldwide competition,” he declared. “Compared to four years ago, America is stronger, our alliances are stronger, our adversaries and competitors are weaker.”
The former president was apparently counting on Americans forgetting or ignoring how his feeble leadership and ill-conceived foreign policies have precipitated chaos in multiple global hot spots.
The fruits of “winning the worldwide competition” apparently include greater Chinese aggression toward U.S. and its partners in the Indo-Pacific; Russia’s attack on Ukraine; attacks on U.S. troops in the Middle East by Iranian proxies, and Hamas’s barbaric and vicious assaults against Israel, America’s ally.
28th Amendment Fantasy
Biden’s pathetic attempts to compensate at the last minute for a failed presidency saw him take refuge in fantasy as he insisted that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)— which would open the door for the radical left to advance twisted gender and racial theory — had been ratified as the 28th Amendment to the Constitution.
“Today, I affirmed the Equal Rights Amendment to have cleared all the necessary hurdles to be added to the U.S. Constitution now,” Biden said shortly before leaving office. “The Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land now. It’s the 28th amendment to the Constitution now.”
In making that astonishing declaration which collides with simple facts on the ground— the ERA long ago failed to secure the number of states’ votes for ratification—Biden demonstrated his inability to discern the line between wishful daydream and reality.
As attorney Elle Purnell noted in the Federalist, the ERA “died 43 years ago when it failed to obtain ratification by three-fourths of state legislatures. It’s dead in the water.”
The ERA was proposed in 1923 and passed Congress in 1972. Under U.S. law, amendments to the Constitution, after approved by Congress, must be ratified by three-fourths (38) of the 50 state legislatures. They do not require presidential approval.
By a 1982 deadline, only 35 states had ratified the amendment. It was not until 2020 that Virginia became the 38th state to ratify it. Opponents said the deadline to include it in the Constitution had passed, while supporters argued the Constitution sets no deadline on the issue of ratification.
In 2023 the U.S. Senate blocked a measure to remove the 1982 deadline. A full century after the law was proposed, the Senate voted 51-47 in favor of removing the deadline, nine votes short of the 60 needed to clear the Senate’s filibuster hurdle.
The National Archivist of the United States, charged with officially publishing ratified amendments, weighed in on Dec. 17, 2024, confirming that the ERA was not ratified, citing binding legal precedent. “There is no 28th Amendment,” the statement said.
“Biden’s announcement is both cynical and irrelevant,” said former Assistant U.S. attorney Andrew McCarthy on Fox News. “If he believed what he is saying, he would’ve said it when his administration started, not when he is on his way out the door as a failed, one-term president.
“More importantly,” McCarthy added, “the president has no constitutional role in the amendment process, so his view carries no weight.”
“President Biden seems intent on moving his administration from the odious to the absurd,” law professor Jonathan Turley said on Fox News. “This was a pandering moment to the most extreme elements in his party. It is a position based on a long-rejected and ridiculous foundation.”
Turley also noted that the former president “notably stopped short of giving the left what it wanted most: an actual executive order on the ratification. He simply made a declaration and presumably left the matter up to the National Archivist.” [See Sidebar]
Rolling Back A Destructive Legacy
President Donald Trump blasted President Biden’s last-minute policy decisions during an interview a few days before his inauguration, singling out his ban on oil and gas drilling.
“I see it just came over that Biden has banned all oil and gas drilling across 625 million acres of US coastal territory. It’s just ridiculous. What’s he doing? Why is he doing it?” Trump asked the show’s host.
“We have oil and gas at a level that nobody else has, and we’re going to take advantage of it. When somebody says he’s going to ban 625 million acres, he doesn’t even know what 625 million acres look like, and we can’t let such a thing happen to our country. It would mean giving up the biggest assets that we have. We’re not going to let that happen to our country.”
“The good news is I can change it immediately,” said Trump. “It’ll be changed on day one.”
President Trump not only made good on this promise by cancelling Biden’s sweeping ban on offshore gas drilling, but signed scores of executive orders cancelling the most destructive of Biden’s policies, immediately following his inauguration.
“I’ll revoke nearly 80 destructive and radical executive actions of the previous administration,” Trump told a crowd in Washington after his inaugural speech. He also said he would end the policy of “trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life” and would push for a “color blind and merit-based” society.
Many of the executive actions the new president later signed in the White House applied to immigration and the border crisis. Although it’s questionable whether Trump can undo the “protected status” Biden gave to one million illegal immigrants, it’s clear he’s going to try.
He signed an order declaring an emergency at the southern U.S. border, along with several other immigration-related policies. The executive action paves the way to send troops to the border and makes good on campaign promises to implement hardline immigration policies.
“All illegal entry will immediately be halted, and we will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came,” Trump had promised in his inauguration speech.
“The largest deportation program in American history” would begin as early as this week, he added.
Among the slew of executive actions the president signed, one order stood out, hailed by Jews the world over.
Trump signed an order revoking the unjust sanctions the Biden administration, led by former Secretary of State Antony Blinken, had imposed on residents of Yehuda and Shomron. Biden and Blinken—whose hostility to Israel became more and more blatant as the Gaza war continued—had just renewed those sanctions for another year.
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Who Was Running The Country?
Early in 2024, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson was invited to a meeting at the Oval Office with several of Biden’s top national security advisers and cabinet chiefs, the Free Press recounted in a disturbing anecdote about Biden’s confused state of mind.
The apparent purpose of the meeting was to persuade Johnson to support the latest aid package for Ukraine. But Johnson also wanted to talk with the president one-on-one about his recent executive order that halted new permits to export American liquefied natural gas (LNG) to America’s European allies. This was a vital issue for Johnson’s Louisiana constituents.
In the course of his private meeting with Biden, Johnson learned the president was unaware of his own executive order—was actually stunned to hear that he had signed it.
First reported a number of weeks ago quoting anonymous sources, the story was given added credibility after being recounted by Johnson in a Free Press interview with Bari Weiss.
“Can I ask you a question? I cannot resolve a certain concern from my constituents in Louisiana,” Johnson recalled telling Biden. “Sir, why did you pause LNG exports to Europe? Liquefied natural gas is in great demand by our allies. Why would you do that? Because you must understand, we just talked about Ukraine, you know you are fueling Vladimir Putin’s war machine, because they gotta get their gas from him now.”
Biden, according to Johnson, appeared dumbfounded. “I didn’t do that,” he protested.
“Mr. President, yes you did. It was an executive order like three weeks ago,” Johnson responded. Biden continued to deny that he paused the LNG exports. At that point, Johnson suggested that the president ask the president’s secretary to print out the executive order, so the two could read it together.
Biden then recalled that he had signed an executive order, but it only called for a “study on the effects of LNG.”
According to the report, Johnson pressed his point. “Sir, you paused it, I know,” he told Biden. “I have the [gas] export terminals in my state. I talked to those people in my state, I’ve talked to those people this morning; this is doing massive damage to our economy, to national security.”
Johnson commented in the interview that he realized that Biden “was not lying” to him. “He genuinely did not know what he had signed,” the Speaker of the House said. “I don’t know who put the paper in front of him for his signature but he didn’t know what he had signed.”
“And I walked out of that meeting with fear and loathing,” Johnson confessed, “because I thought, we are in serious trouble—who is running the country?
A disturbing December report in the WSJ revealed White House aides had been covering up Biden’s mental decline since the very beginning of his term. In January 2021, aides had already begun to limit his in-person interactions. They also cancelled meetings whenever Biden seemed tired or not coherent.
If this was Biden’s situation in 2021, one can imagine how matters must have deteriorated 2025. By then, the scenario of one White House aide or another pushing a document before a confused and befuddled president and urging him to sign it without him knowing what it said, had likely become a routine occurrence
Speaker Johnson’s question reverberates…. Who indeed was running the country?
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The ERA Mirage: Unmasking the Pitfalls
Why would so many be opposed to an amendment that enshrines equal rights for all citizens and prohibits discrimination based on gender?
Opposition to the Equal Right Amendment stems from fears that, despite its seemingly benign language, the amendment could be weaponized by progressive courts to impose a radical woke agenda on all Americans, under the guise of gender and racial equality.
One has only to take a close look at ERA proposals tacked onto the 2024 November presidential election ballot in some states to grasp the validity of those concerns.
In the New York version of the ERA amendment called Proposal One (which voters passed), a key paragraph allows the government to punish or prosecute a person, institution or business in order to prevent discrimination or merely “unequal treatment.”
That term can be stretched to mean almost anything, depending on interpretation. Progressive courts might determine that choosing to hire a competent candidate over an unqualified one is “discrimination” or “unequal treatment.” Such courts might rule that minorities should be prioritized in the name of “equity, diversion and inclusion (DEI)”—even if they possess inferior qualifications.
In a woke universe “unequal treatment” can be stretched to include “unequal outcomes,” whereby employers and teachers might reward people for hard work and superior performance. Such “unequal outcomes” might be deemed racist and therefore grounds for a lawsuit.
Under ERA, people could be prosecuted for “crimes” that never existed before.
A school that refuses to accept a student or hire a teacher who openly practices an immoral lifestyle can be hauled into court and prosecuted for discriminating against someone based on their gender and beliefs.
Schools found guilty of this violation of civil law today can lose government funding. Under ERA, however, the party responsible for not accepting or hiring moral deviants can be heavily fined or arrested.
In the parallel universe championed by the radical left, ERA could be interpreted to require that men and women be treated equally in all aspects of military service. Women could be required to register for the draft or be placed in combat roles.
Physical fitness standards might be eliminated in the military so as not to promote “unequal outcomes” when women can’t match male stamina and physical strength. This could negatively impact the strength and readiness of the U.S Armed Forces. According to informed sources, it has already done so.
Deeply Hostile to Religion
A society shaped by radical far-left ideology which Democrats and liberals relentlessly promote, would be deeply hostile to Jewish moral and ethical principles. If ERA were ratified, religious institutions could find themselves running afoul of the new law for moral teachings that condemn actions that ERA “protects.”
Courts could interpret ERA as requiring absolute “gender neutrality,” and that would mean striking down any distinctions based on male-female considerations. Consider the implications: women-only schools and maternity-leave policies might be deemed unconstitutional for “discriminating” against men.
In a lunatic world dominated by woke ideology seeking to erase all distinctions between men and women, separate facilities for women and girls including public restrooms, shelters and various other accommodations could be challenged as “discriminatory.”
President Trump took aim at the left’s increasing moral degeneracy in his inaugural address, making clear what is of course obvious, that differences between men and women are immutable and pretending otherwise is a dead end.
“It is the policy of the United States that there are only two genders, male and female,” he said.
The fact that this announcement grabbed headlines as though it introduced a revolutionary idea is both tragic and comical, highlighting the absurd moral depths to which parts of American society have fallen.
