The New York Times Has Tied Itself Into Knots With This One [View all]

[mcar]

The New York Times Has Tied Itself Into Knots With This One
The Paper of Record suggests President Joe Biden keep one foot in reality and the other on a banana peel.

By Charles P. Pierce
Jan 28, 2021

I've been in training because I knew this was coming. For all the griping about the interviews with people in midwest diners, there was a lot of tough reporting on the previous administration*. You have to admit that it was a target-rich environment. So, when the election came, and the various thieves and mountebanks were turfed out, I had a pretty good idea what would happen. The people who run and edit and program major news outlets were going to look at all the great, meaty coverage and, instead of feeling proud of their part in running the worst presidency* in American history out of town, and acting out of the insecurity that has been bred into the news biz ever since Spiro Agnew ran amok in the early 1970s, they would go out of their way to show that they hadn't been acting out of partisan malice. So I have worked at being alert for evidence of this phenomenon. That ridiculous New York Times story about Joe Biden's watch was Exhibit A. Now comes the NYT with an even more obvious example.

You can read newspapers for 50 years and not see a newspaper tie itself in knots the way the Times does in this editorial. It acknowledges throughout that the new administration is facing rigid, if completely predictable, obstruction from Republican congressional majorities as it tries to do those things it was elected to do. But it insists that the most obvious solution to this completely man-made problem is just as much a problem as the obstruction itself.

A polarized, narrowly divided Congress may offer Mr. Biden little choice but to employ executive actions or see his entire agenda held hostage. These directives, however, are a flawed substitute for legislation. They are intended to provide guidance to the government and need to work within the discretion granted the executive by existing law or the Constitution. They do not create new law — though executive orders carry the force of law — and they are not meant to serve as an end run around the will of Congress. By design, such actions are more limited in what they can achieve than legislation, and presidents who overreach invite intervention by the courts.

Now, I read the NYT nearly every day, so I know that its editors have not been comatose since 2008, when Mitch McConnell first vowed that Barack Obama would not be permitted to do what he'd promised he'd do. It is obvious to the wide world that there is no good-faith partner for bipartisan action in the Congress, and there hasn't been for more than a decade. It is obvious to the wide world that the general welfare of the country is a secondary consideration to the Republican congressional minorities. The new Senate hasn't even been allowed to organize itself yet; as of Thursday, Republicans were still chairing all the Senate committees. The Times doesn't present any solutions, except to note that Biden ran for president as a legislative dealmaker—which was nice, but also was the functional equivalent of running for president as an aardvark. The obvious solution—burning down the filibuster and then legislating like wildfire—is not mentioned, and not even all the Democrats are onboard with it anyway. The Times suggests that the new president keep one foot in political reality and the other on a banana peel. This is no way to run a democratic republic. Tell me something I don't know.

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a35352859/new-york-times-joe-biden-executive-orders/