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Joe Biden was planning tonight one of the most turbulent and uncertain transitions to the White House in modern US presidential history as he charted his way to Inauguration Day on January 20.
With the Democratic presidential candidate expressing certainty that he had won the election even when the result was not announced, staff members of a transition team created months ago were preparing the next steps.
The road ahead, if you win, is overwhelming. On the one hand, Biden faces a sitting US president who has vowed to fight in court to stay in the Oval Office and has given no indication that he might budge.
Second, clarity on which party is in the Senate will have to wait until January, as the two Georgia races whose results will decide are being repeated. If Republicans retain the majority, they can block Biden’s legislation and cabinet nominees.
And third, there is a deadly virus that is spreading uncontrollably across the United States, with daily new cases of Covid-19 increasing 35 percent in the past fortnight, and a US economy reeling from the largest rise in unemployment since the 1930s.
Biden, who during the campaign promised swift action to address the coronavirus pandemic that has claimed more than 240,000 lives, will announce the details of his 12-member Covid task force on Sunday.
It will be led by former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, former Food and Drug Administration Commissioner David Kessler, and Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith of Yale University.
Unlike Great Britain, the winner of the US presidential election does not take office once the outcome is known.
Instead, any incoming candidate must wait more than two months for an official delivery in mid-January. In the recent past that has almost always happened without rancor. Presidents have met with their successors in the White House, even if they are from the other party, as Barack Obama did with Donald Trump in 2016, and offered them support.
The incoming president’s teams are dispatched to departments of the United States government in what are called “landing parties,” dispatched to survey the scene. They are briefed on the status quo, ready to go on day one. The president-elect’s transition team also quickly occupies rooms in an official government building and receives support as they plan for the inauguration day.
The process has been formalized and has some legal protections. This time, uncertainty abounds. Trump could order his government employees, perhaps in a tweet, to refuse to interact with Biden’s advisers given his public stance that he won the election and that it is being “stolen.”
Even if Biden’s margins of victory in key states on the battlefield are considerable and the likelihood of a court decision affecting him is slim, it could take weeks for the Trump campaign’s legal challenges to move through the system, giving coverage to the president.
Perhaps anticipating the difficult weeks that would follow any victory, Biden has put one of his closest advisers and friends in charge of his transition team.
Ted Kaufman, who was Biden’s chief of staff in the Senate for more than a decade, was asked to take office in April after his former boss effectively secured the Democratic presidential nomination. The two are such strong friends that Kaufman took over from Biden in Delaware in the Senate when the latter became vice president.
“He is the person closest to Joe whose last name is not Biden,” Paul Begala, a US political consultant, said yesterday.
Traditionally, meeting potential Cabinet members is a top priority. Trump held weeks of rallies at Trump Tower when a parade of political and business leaders came to be interviewed for jobs after the 2016 election. Biden’s head hurts, not Trump.
This time, two different parties may end up occupying the White House and the Senate, which must confirm the cabinet appointments with a vote after the hearings.
There are already reports in Washington DC suggesting that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader known for being a ruthless possessor of political power, could block Biden’s appointments if his party occupies the Senate. Specifically, Republicans could seek to keep Biden’s cabinet centrist even as the incoming president seeks to placate both wings of his party by appointing prominent leftists in key positions.
Would Republicans give their thumbs up if Biden appoints Elizabeth Warren, the senator who favors a wealth tax, to the Treasury or Susan Rice, in government when she hit the attack on the Benghazi embassy in 2012, to the State Department? ?
A figure advising Biden’s campaign on foreign policy said those political realities could force Biden to “rethink the individual appointments that are more controversial.”
Even if McConnell plays with the cabinet, he may not play with the legislation. Biden’s proposals to create a government-funded health care option for all Americans or introduce a bold but expensive law to address climate change may hit a brick wall.
Lines of communication with world leaders are also being prepared. Avril Haines, a former deputy national security adviser under Barack Obama, is believed to spearhead the transition team’s foreign policy brief.
A European official told this newspaper that there was already a fight to make sure its leaders spoke to Biden first. “Everybody is going to want early phone calls,” the source said.
There are also political benefits to publicly going forward with the transition process even when the outcome of an election is challenged in court. Projects certainty in victory.
During the controversial presidential elections of 2000, George W. Bush announced cabinet elections in the weeks after the elections even though their outcome was highly disputed.
Clay Johnson, executive director of the Bush 2000 transition team, recalled yesterday how then-Republican vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney told him: “We have to assume that we are going to be president-elect.” They made plans accordingly, Johnson explained on CNN, including starting their own informal background checks on potential Cabinet members, led by a former high-ranking White House attorney.
In that contest, when the Supreme Court finally ruled in Bush’s favor more than a month after the election, the defeated candidate, Al Gore, relented and incumbent President Bill Clinton smoothed out the transition.
Nor is it a fact this time.
