The Mean Season Nears Its End
A
succession of Trump policies reflected the administration’s spite and
heartlessness.
Contributing
Opinion Writer
- Nov. 19, 2020, 5:00 a.m. ET
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.
In his opinion invalidating the
memorandum, Judge Garaufis simply described these measures without evaluating
them. He didn’t have to, because he concluded that Mr. Wolf lacked authority to
issue the memo, having been improperly designated as acting D.H.S. secretary.
The judge’s 31-page opinion offers an
intricate account of the bureaucratic turmoil that has left the mammoth agency
and its quarter-million employees without Senate-confirmed leadership for 600
days and counting. His deadpan account of the ways in which the formal rules of
succession were flipped and evaded by a changing cast of characters makes the
department seem like a Feydeau farce. (In a footnote, Judge Garaufis observed
dryly: “The court wishes the government well in trying to find its way out of this
self-made thicket.”)
But at the heart of
this tale is meanness. Failing to bend the Supreme Court to its will, the
administration tried to take revenge on a vulnerable group of people whose only
offense, through no fault of their own, is living among us.
And then there is Betsy DeVos, the
secretary of education who doesn’t believe in public education. She also
doesn’t believe in granting legally required relief to indebted students who
were defrauded by the for-profit colleges to which they paid tuition with
federally guaranteed student loans. Stacy Cowley and Tara Siegel Bernard reported this distressing story in The Times last
week.
Last month, in a scathing opinion,
Judge William Alsup of Federal District Court in San Francisco wrote that the
secretary’s policy of routinely denying applications for loan forgiveness
without explanation “frankly, hangs borrowers out to dry.” While under
President Barack Obama, the Department of Education granted applications at the
rate of 99.2 percent, the current denial rate is 94.4 percent, with a backlog of
more than 100,000 cases.
“Simply put, where there’s smoke,
there’s fire,” Judge Alsup wrote. “We need to know what is really going on.” He
ordered expedited discovery in a class-action lawsuit brought on behalf of the
defrauded borrowers, whom the judge described as suffering from “shared
trauma.” He said: “They sought opportunity via higher education only to be
deceived by for-profit institutions and, at least in some cases, saddled with
crushing debt.”
If there is a policy reason for her
behavior, Secretary DeVos hasn’t articulated one; Judge Alsup called the
department’s failure to explain itself “galling.”
Meanness might explain a lot.
Education has been a special Trump
target. Given the president’s negative attitude toward both foreigners and
higher education, it should have been no surprise that his administration came
up with a particularly diabolical pandemic-justified way to disrupt the lives
of thousands of international students enrolled in American universities.
Students whose universities had gone to remote learning would lose their
student visas and have to return home.
When Harvard and M.I.T.
sued, the administration caved. But at the same time, students seeking to enter
the United States to attend schools that still offer in-person classes had a
very had time getting visas because U.S. consulates have essentially stopped
processing them. As a result, international student enrollment on U.S.
campuses fell this semester by
43 percent.
What could have been
the reason for unsettling so many lives (and so many college budgets) in such
an obviously self-defeating effort to wall the country off from the global
world? The administration knew it couldn’t defend itself in court. Meanness is
an explanation, not a defense.
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.
