By Amy Goodman & Denis Moynihan
Donald Trump will become President of the United States on Monday, January 20th, 2025. Until that time, though, President Joe Biden remains in the Oval Office. Biden spoke to his cabinet and staff Thursday in a Rose Garden address: “Now we have 74 days to finish the term, our term. Let’s make every day count. That’s the responsibility we have to the American people.” There is much Biden can and should do in this “lame duck” period, before disappearing over the horizon in one final trip aboard the presidential helicopter, Marine One (unless he takes the train to Delaware, as he proudly did throughout his Senate career). He has a narrow window in which to act, and could do significant good, repairing some of his own mistakes and blunting some of what Donald Trump has pledged will begin on Day One.
First and most importantly, Biden should suspend all arms shipments to Israel. Period. Not one more bomb, not one more bullet. Israel’s mass slaughter of civilians in Gaza is increasingly described as outright, livestreamed genocide. The Israeli military is now forcing the entire population of the northern quarter of the Gaza Strip to leave for the south. This follows the release of “The Generals’ Plan,” drafted by retired Israeli military officers, calling for the systematic denial of humanitarian aid in the north, which has been labeled ethnic cleansing. Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported this week, “The army has begun the stage of cleansing the northern Strip while it prepares to hold onto the area for a long time to come.”
Israel is using US taxpayer-funded arms to decimate Palestinians in Gaza, in clear contravention of US and international law. The people of Gaza are trapped, under siege, surrounded by the Israeli army and navy, with armed drones, helicopters and military jets overhead. They are being driven from their homes, starved, bombed, shot by snipers, killed by tank shells, and forced to live without clean water, sanitation, functioning hospitals, or the basics of survival. Every aspect of their society, their culture, their history, is being erased by Israel’s unrelenting bombardment and by smiling, selfie-snapping IDF demolition crews. None of this would have been possible without Biden’s support.
Haaretz also reported, in early September, that a “senior air force official told Haaretz that without the Americans’ supply of weapons to the Israel Defense Forces, especially the air force, Israel would have had a hard time sustaining its war for more than a few months.”
A leaked letter to Israel from Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin demanded Israel immediately allow US humanitarian aid shipments to Gaza or face an interruption in arms shipments. They gave Israel until November 13th to comply. But the laws governing arms shipments don’t include a month-long grace period; the cessation is supposed to be immediate. Nevertheless, as the deadline approaches, and with the situation in northern Gaza becoming more catastrophic by the day, it seems that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a staunch Trump ally, has no intention of allowing in aid.
Domestically, Biden could preempt some of the violence expected from the incoming Trump administration.
Biden promised to end the federal death penalty when he was campaigning in 2020, after President Trump ordered the execution of 13 federal death row prisoners in his final six months in office. With the stroke of a pen, Biden could commute the sentences of the forty current federal death row prisoners to life in prison. This would empty federal death row, denying Trump the opportunity to engage in another killing spree. Biden could also commute the sentences of the four prisoners awaiting execution on the US military’s death row.
Biden could also impact Trump’s anticipated mass deportation that was a central pledge of his campaign. Law professors Peter Markowitz and Lindsay Nash from the Benjamin Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York have revived an argument proposed by scores of advocacy groups in the waning days of the Obama administration, that “the President possesses the constitutional authority to categorically pardon broad classes of immigrants for civil violations of the immigration laws and to thereby provide durable and permanent protections against deportation.”
Biden could act on the admittedly novel legal theory, by granting millions of undocumented immigrants relief from the myriad and often violently inflicted injustices of the US’s failed immigration policies. Such a move would certainly be challenged in court, but would potentially slow down what will almost certainly be a horrendous attempt by Donald Trump to deport up to 12 million US residents.
People are organizing now on how to resist the incoming Trump administration. Biden could join them, by using the constitutional powers of the office of the President of the United States, the most powerful position on earth.