President Biden’s Last Stand

With just a few weeks left to go before he steps down, U.S. President Joe Biden has one last chance to do something big to shore up his fragile legacy and bolster a battered Democratic Party.

Right now, there are not many good feelings about the commander in chief. Republicans, of course, perceive him to be one of the worst leaders in U.S. history. His approval ratings remain in the low 40s. Biden’s unpopular policies for dealing with inflation and immigration proved to be insurmountable barriers to Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign.

Meanwhile, many Democrats harbor deep resentment that Biden insisted on running at all rather than opening the door to a full primary that would have given candidates, including Harris, more time to familiarize the public with what they stood for and to test ideas on the campaign trail. Instead, Democrats were forced to scramble at the last minute following Biden’s embarrassing performance in a debate against former President Donald Trump. With Harris unable to shake herself free of the baggage that the president forced her to carry, the election brought Trump back into the highest levels of power, thereby negating the basic promise that Biden had made voters in 2019, when he promised to save the soul of the United States. Trumpism has not been banished from the body politic. Trumpism has been entrenched.

Though he faces massive obstacles in the final two months of his term, including an emboldened Republican House that has little appetite for compromise, Biden can still use the executive power that he has to leave an imprint on national politics and offer Democrats something to build on as they attempt to remake their coalition in the years ahead.

There is precedent for a lame-duck president to assert their authority in bold fashion. The last one-term Democratic president in the Oval Office muscled through Congress a historic piece of legislation that remains one of the most enduring contributions to environmentalism.

By the time of the 1980 election, President Jimmy Carter was in terrible political shape. He remained deeply unpopular with the electorate. His approval ratings fell into the low 30s. To the consternation of many Americans, the president had failed to end stagflation—the combination of inflation and unemployment—and had not brought an end to the energy crisis that produced massive gas lines and fuel shortages. Overseas, the situation was even worse. U.S. hostages had been held captive in Iran since November and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 had created the impression that communism was on the march.

On Nov. 4, a majority of voters expressed their dissatisfaction by electing Ronald Reagan, a Republican. He won 489 Electoral College votes. The sting for Democrats was especially painful since Reagan was not just any Republican. He was the titular representative of a burgeoning conservative movement that was attempting to push U.S. politics sharply to the right. He and fellow conservatives rejected the basic principles of the New Deal (1930s) and Great Society (1960s) programs that had defined the Democratic Party. Making matters worse, Republicans had won control of the Senate for the first time since 1955.

Carter refused to fade into the darkness without a few more fights, however. He spent a good portion of his final months tackling the challenges of environmentalism. Carter was ahead of his time in prioritizing the issue, even though many members of his own party had little appetite for dealing with the nation’s destructive dependence on oil and gas.

One of Carter’s final moves revolved around Alaska, a state that attracted intense interest from the energy sector. Upon being admitted to the union in 1959, the Alaska Statehood Act specified that state officials would retain control of 100 million acres of land for development without federal interference. Following the discovery of oil in March 1968 on Alaska’s North Slope, pressure to construct a major pipeline intensified. The nascent environmental movement of the 1960s pressured government officials to protect the state’s ecosystem. The state’s Indigenous groups also worried about burial grounds, artifacts, and control over their traditional way of life.

A local movement took hold to protect the land. The Alaska Coalition campaigned to protect over 116 million acres of land to be parks, rivers and refuges. They drew inspiration from a 1953 article in the Sierra Club Bulletin, Northeast Arctic by George Collins and Lowell Sumner. One of the most vocal champions was Celia Hunter, who first visited Alaska in 1947 and never left, becoming a conservation activist starting when she formed the Alaska Conservation Society in 1960.

In 1971, the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act attempted to resolve claims by native populations and authorized the Secretary of Interior to place over 75 million acres of land under federal protection to prevent economic development. The legislation also cordoned off 45 additional acres until December 18, 1978. If Congress failed to act by the deadline, the land would be reopened to development. As the date approached in 1977 without any action, congressional supporters of conservation, such as Arizona Rep. Morris Udall, pushed for their colleagues to pass a bill. Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, a Republican, worked Sen. Mike Gravel, a Democrat, to stop them.

Facing gridlock on Capitol Hill, Carter turned to executive power. The Antiquities Act of 1906, signed into law by President Theodore Roosevelt, had created strong protections for cultural and natural resources on federal land (deemed to be of “historic or scientific interest”). Under the legislation, Carter worked with Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus to insulate more than 50 million acres of land as national monuments. It would take an act of Congress to change the new national monument borders.

Environmentalists were elated. Alaskans were furious. Congressman Gravel griped: “In adding superfluous layers of protection, the Administration is perpetuating a popular belief about Alaska which simply is not true: namely, that Alaska is so full of natural resource wealth that developers are just waiting for the sound of a gun, like the Oklahoma land rush, to race in and dig up the land.” “My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits,” Carter wrote in A Full Life: Reflections at Ninety. “I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and a few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.”

With environmentalists reinvigorated, the momentum for legislation intensified. Stevens broke with Alaskans and was open to negotiations with the Carter administration. “The Alaska lands bill support was so great that the opponents, particularly Ted Stevens, have now moved toward private negotiation to work out a compromise,” Carter wrote in his diary on July 23, 1980. Washington Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson and Massachusetts Sen. Paul Tsongas moved forward with a compromise that would provide vast protection while allowing for oil and gas explorations in certain areas as a sweetener for the state.

In an effort to curtail the bill, Stevens made a last-minute gambit to reduce the scale and scope of the measure. During a meeting with Carter, the senator walked the president through different sections of state to argue why some should be left out of the measure. But Carter had mastered the geography and the science. When Stevens focused on one small area to explain why it should fall outside the parameters of federal protection, according to Kai Bird in The Outlier, Carter rolled out a large map and explained in painstaking detail why the Alaskan was dead wrong. “He knows more about Alaska than I do!” Stevens said on the car ride back to his office.

Initially, Udall had rejected the legislation, but he, too, changed his tune following the results of the election. Politics had shifted to the right, and there was limited time before any legislation would become impossible.

Though he was forced to accept oil and gas exploration on all offshore areas and on 95 percent of the “potentially productive oil and mineral areas,” Carter was still pleased when he signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act into law on Dec. 2. Safeguards were also put into place that would regulate development. The legislation protected more than 157 million acres of land, constituting the most significant expansion of protected lands in U.S. history. According to Carter biographer Jonathan Alter in His Very Best, “With one stroke of the pen, he doubled the size of the national park system, tripled wilderness areas, and preserved twenty-five free-flowing rivers, thus enduring his place in the first rank of conservationist presidents.”

Udall praised Carter. “No president has done more, with the possible exception of Theodore Roosevelt, to do things in conservation that need being done, and nobody can ever take that away from you.”

Since 1980, the bill has been considered by historians to be one of the most relevant accomplishments of Carter’s presidency and an enduring foundation for Democrats and some moderate Republicans, who would continue to fight for the primacy of federal environmental regulations. While comparable legislation is simply not on the table for Biden in 2024, he does have a number of options.

One concrete step Biden could take would be commuting the sentences of people who are on federal death row. (He is the first president to openly oppose the federal death penalty.) In 2021, after Trump had overseen an unprecedented 13 executions in six months, Attorney General Merrick Garland imposed a moratorium. “The Department of Justice must ensure that everyone in the federal criminal justice system is not only afforded the rights guaranteed by the Constitution and laws of the United States, but is also treated fairly and humanely. That obligation has special force in capital cases,” Garland declared. By all indications, Trump is determined to show his law-and-order chops in his upcoming second term by resuming the executions with vigor. “Commuting federal death sentences will redress the legacy of racial bias inherent to capital punishment and make Trump’s brutal plans for another killing spree impossible,” the American Civil Liberties Union has declared.

A second deployment of executive power would be to expedite the allocation and expenditure of funds from the Inflation Reduction Act to ensure that “unspent” money for clean-energy initiatives won’t be impounded by Trump in 2025. Biden can couple that with executive orders that address unsolved matters such as finally banning offshore drilling. Officials in the White House have been describing their goals as “sprinting to the finish.”

The third option would be to implement changes that limit some of what Trump can do with his power, such as expanding limitations against surveillance. The American Civil Liberties Union has called for a moratorium on the government being able to buy personal data without having a warrant.

The fourth is immigration. While the Democrats have moved fast to the center, going all in on border control, Biden can remind the nation that Democrats still insist on a humanitarian solution to these problems. With mass deportation and the resumption of family separation looming, Katrina vanden Heuvel argued in the Nation, “President Biden can try to stymie this sadism by fast-tracking citizenship applications, reversing an executive order restricting asylum, and expanding work permits for undocumented immigrants. These compassionate reforms could profoundly change the outlook for many people who might otherwise be under threat in January and beyond.”

Fifth, he can toughen sanctions on Russia and Iran. Most dramatic would be achieving a durable cease-fire between Israel and the Palestinians as is now in the works with Lebanon. And finally, his administration can work with Senate Democrats to fill as many of the federal judicial vacancies that are in place.

None of these actions will wipe away the damage that has been done to Biden’s legacy and the Democratic Party’s standing, but, collectively, they would allow Biden to put another big stamp on national policy and would give elected officials something concrete to build on as they begin the process of planning the 2026 midterms.