The Mean Season Nears Its End. by Linda Greenhouse
A succession of Trump policies reflected the administration’s spite and heartlessness.
'During four years struggling to keep up with the flood of court cases challenging the refusal by various Trump administration officials to follow the law, a word has come to mind so often that I can’t shake it. It’s the word “mean.” There’s a meanness to the man and to the policies issued from the sycophantic bubble that passes for his administration.
Mean may be too mild and commonplace a word to describe the astonishing fact that the Department of Homeland Security cannot find the parents of 545 children separated from them at the southern border. A violation of human rights, a descent into bureaucratic immorality, is more appropriate.
Nonetheless, mean is a word that should sting. It’s what links this administration’s actions across the government. Judges don’t use the word themselves, but it pervades their accounts of how the controversies reached a climax in their courtrooms. So I’d like to inject the word into the discourse about the Trump administration in these waning weeks.
One example is a decision this past weekend by Judge Nicholas Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn. He invalidated a series of moves by Chad Wolf, the supposed acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, following the Supreme Court’s decision in June that stopped President Trump from canceling DACA, the Obama administration program that still protects from deportation undocumented immigrants who were brought here as children.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a 5-to-4 majority, said the Trump administration’s rescission effort was “arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act. Notably, the decision didn’t say that the administration couldn’t cancel the program, but only that it had to go back to the drawing board and do so correctly. Among other factors, the chief justice said, the administration had to take into account the “reliance interests” of the hundreds of thousands of young people who have been accepted into the program and have ordered their lives according to its terms.
But rather than even try to walk through the door that the Supreme Court had opened, Acting Secretary Wolf went around to the back door to disable DACA to the maximum extent possible. He issued a memorandum instructing the department to reject all pending and future DACA applications; to reject all pending and future requests for “advance parole,” the status that permits DACA recipients to re-enter the country if they need to leave, for example, to visit family members; and to require DACA recipients to renew their status annually instead of every two years. . .
Looking ahead, we know that Jan. 20, 2021 — Inauguration Day — won’t mark an end to the country’s troubles. President-elect Joseph R. Biden’s administration will face enormous challenges. At times, it will fail to meet them. At times, we will gnash our teeth, dispute the president’s priorities, question his judgment.
But we have this to look forward to: He won’t be mean.'
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/19/opinion/trump-policy-mean.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
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