On the menu today: President Biden and his administration have spent the past few months accurately decrying the Russian threat to the “rules-based international order” that they envision. But if Biden finds the American people less than roused by this rallying cry, perhaps the president and his team should reexamine the state of rules-based order here at home — and recognize how their own actions have undermined that order.
The Rules-Based Order at Home
Throughout the past few months, President Biden has accurately described Vladimir Putin and Russia’s aggressive moves toward Ukraine as a destabilizing threat to the “rules-based international order.” But as I have tried to emphasize throughout that time, there is no “rules-based international order” in any meaningful sense, and Putin — as well as the rulers of China, Iran, North Korea, the Taliban in Afghanistan etc. — don’t want to preserve Biden’s vision of a “rules-based international order”; they want to replace it with an international order where they make the rules.
If Biden finds the rallying cry of “rules-based international order” generating underwhelming results among the American people, it may be because the American people don’t feel much rules-based order in their own lives. A sense of slowly creeping chaos is manifesting itself in a million different ways — runaway inflation and skyrocketing food and fuel prices, the supply-chain crisis making everyday products unavailable on store shelves, a lingering labor shortage instead of a jobs shortage, rising crime rates, worsening drug addiction, social isolation from pandemic restrictions, and more.
But there are other ways in which Biden and his political allies have demonstrated either an inability to bring rules-based order to the lives of the American people, or a downright contempt for it.
Start with our insecure border. U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents apprehended more than 2 million migrants at the southwest border during Biden’s first year in office, likely the highest number in over 20 years, according to a National Review analysis of CBP data.
“The Biden administration has broken the border,” contends Andrew Arthur, resident fellow in law and policy at the Center for Immigration Studies. “It might have been Biden’s rhetoric at the beginning; it certainly was. But now there are just so many people, the border’s broken, and Border Patrol lacks the capacity, CBP lacks the capacity to deal with the huge numbers of people that they’re seeing. So they let them go, which just encourages more to come in.”
This has not been a brief or temporary crisis; last month saw the highest total of migrants in the month of January ever. Biden initially dismissed the notion that there was a problem at the border — “It happens every single, solitary year: There is a significant increase in the number of people coming to the border in the winter months of January, February, March. That happens every year.” Now Biden just doesn’t talk about the border or immigration much.
A rules-based order would ideally eliminate, or, more realistically, minimize illegal crossings of U.S. borders. Biden clearly doesn’t find this to be a priority. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported just 55,590 illegal immigrants in 2021, the fewest number in five years.
The current rules-based order in the American system of government includes the filibuster, and for a long time, Joe Biden ardently defended the filibuster as a necessary tool to ensure the rights of the minority in the U.S. Senate. For decades, the party with a majority in the Senate fumed about the filibuster and contended it obstructed needed legislation, and the party with a minority in the Senate talked about its importance as a tool to prevent the tyranny of the majority. Even if you don’t like the filibuster, you must recognize it is part of the existing “rules-based order,” and forces senators to make a good-faith effort to build consensus.
Then Biden decided that the filibuster was becoming a pain and declared it should be eliminated, but just for civil-rights legislation. He went to Capitol Hill to persuade the rest of his party, but couldn’t convince Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema; unsurprisingly, Sinema did not want to placate the kinds of people who chased her into a bathroom and berated her while she was sitting in the stall. If Biden wants to defend a rules-based order, how about he defend the tradition of allowing people to do their business in the bathroom in peace?
Several times, Biden has pursued policies that he conceded the Supreme Court was extremely likely to find unconstitutional, such as his eviction moratorium. This is not smart politics or shrewdness; this is a violation of the president’s oath to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution.” The notion that the U.S. government could use the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to strongarm employers to require their employees get a Covid vaccine was always constitutionally sketchy, but Biden charged ahead anyway, believing that by the time the Supreme Court struck it down, he could force many more Americans to get vaccinated. White House chief of staff Ron Klain approvingly retweeted a statement that “OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.”
The attitude of “We don’t have the constitutional authority to do this, but we’re going to do it anyway” is an attack on the rules-based American order.
Making the vaccines widely available; running public-service announcements, lotteries, and giveaways — all of that was well within the existing rules-based order of the United States. Using the power of the federal government to force businesses to fire unvaccinated employees was not — and lots of Americans who fully support vaccination did not support vaccine mandates.
Although Biden’s advisory panel thankfully declined to endorse the concept, a proposal to expand the U.S. Supreme Court because progressives don’t think they’re going to like the rulings in the coming years is an assault on the “rules-based order” here in this country.
Progressive prosecutors who abuse the principle of prosecutorial discretion and refuse to press charges in cases of armed robberies, other felony gun offenses, and major narcotics trafficking is an assault on the “rules-based order.”
Governors’ and mayors’ use of “emergency powers” two years into a global pandemic is an assault on the American sense of a rules-based order. If something has gone on for 474 days, as in the case of Minnesota, it is not an emergency anymore!
“Hell yes, we’re going to take your AR-15!” Seizing lawfully purchased firearms in the absence of proof of a crime or clear threat to others is not a rules-based order.
If America’s public schools are going to teach critical race theory, or use explicit materials in sex education, this should be done in consultation with parents, and with parents’ consent. For public schools to redefine their mission as an effort to correct erroneous values taught by insufficiently progress parents is an assault on the rules-based order.
Up in Minnesota, Republicans are pushing legislation that would:
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Prohibit schools from withholding information about classes or their children’s well-being from parents.
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Require teachers to provide parents a copy of the course syllabus within the first two weeks.
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Require the school district to provide copies of course materials to parents free of charge
All of this is an attempt to restore a rules-based order where it has been abandoned by the Democratic Party’s allies.
A rules-based international order is indeed in America’s best interests and would help build a safer and more stable world. But even besides the usual habitual isolationism, the American people are understandably under-invested in the concept of a rules-based international order because they are still desperately looking for the restoration of a rules-based order at home. Life has been particularly unpredictable and chaotic since the pandemic, and we’ve all endured an assault upon basic human needs of stability, variety, significance, and connection. It is hard to begrudge someone for being less than fully focused on the security and safety of Kyiv when they’re worried about the security and safety of their own neighborhood.
It sounds farcical to hear Kamala Harris pledging to protect Ukraine’s borders at the Munich Security Conference when she and the rest of the Biden administration have done such an abysmal job of protecting America’s borders.
A rules-based order is not “conservatives getting what they want.” A rules-based order is a system where changes to the law and policy are enacted by the people’s elected representatives, in clear language, debated extensively and honestly, under pre-set rules that are written down. The executive branch carries out and enforces those laws, in a manner that is consistent with the congressional intent, and the court system ensures that the passed laws are consistent with the principles laid out in the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution.
ADDENDUM: The good folks at the Daily Mail asked me to examine the state of Biden’s efforts to deter Putin. At a time when the U.S. and NATO need to communicate clear red lines, Biden is serving up more blurred lines than Robin Thicke. If you don’t want a minor incursion, don’t inadvertently state that you might not respond to one during a press conference. And separately, if you spend months promising “swift and severe” sanctions, don’t enact them gradually, modestly, and intermittently.